Memories of a Simurgh Victim - Diabolus ex Machina
by Thinker6
Summary: The Simurgh comes to Brockton Bay. The Endbringer that sees the future has plans for the city. Victoria Dallon and Taylor Hebert must race against time to save the ones they love. Can they escape the city, or will they be driven mad by the Endbringer's song?
1. Victoria 1

May 16, 2011

12:00 pm

Lunch hour at Arcadia High was a lax affair. Students could eat in the nondescript cafeteria, but in the springtime many went into the courtyard to enjoy the sunny weather. Victoria and Dean were no exception.

Victoria was in a rosy mood. She was wearing a flower-patterned summer dress, one she had spent two hours picking out at the Boardwalk for just such an occasion. Tight enough to show off her curves and statuesque frame, loose enough to billow with her movements, to give them a sense of airy emphasis and flourish.

Dean had been appropriately wowed. He had remained ever the gentleman, of course, but he couldn't disguise how he could barely take his eyes off her. His was an _honest_ appreciation, too. She had checked that it was genuine, made an extra effort to suppress her aura for the first ten minutes of homeroom before she let herself relax.

What pleased her the most was the way he had complimented her, giving her points for style with a twinkle in his eye. He wasn't like the others. Ninety five percent of boys her age were simply stunned by her platinum locks, bright blue eyes, and awe-inducing aura. But Dean made it clear that he wasn't attracted to her simply for her genetic and parahuman gifts, but also for the ways she _cultivated_ her beauty - her style, her personality, her confidence in her own skin. It was inordinately pleasing. She had been literally walking on air for the rest of the morning.

Only an inch off the floor, of course. It would be bad form to flaunt her powers in class.

Dean pushed open the heavy door to the courtyard and gestured with his free hand. "After you, my dear Victoria." he said, a wry smile on his lips.

"Why thank you, my most darling Dean." she replied, tongue firmly in cheek. It was silly of him to act like she needed his help - she was strong enough to bench press a tractor-trailer - but his attempts to be a proper boyfriend were endearingly old-fashioned. Somewhere deep inside her was an eight year old girl raised on Disney movies, who was tickled pink at being treated like a princess.

Victoria scanned the courtyard for free seats, but the tables were packed. Damn. Everyone was eager to take advantage of the good weather. The only sliver of space was at a table on the far side of the courtyard, where a group of freshman girls were sitting.

One of the girls noticed her gaze, and soon the rest of them cut off their conversation and gave Victoria and Dean their undivided attention. Well, of course they did. She was a glorious superhero and he was the varsity athlete and high-society heir of the Stansfield family. The picture-perfect couple that teenagers across the Eastern seaboard could only dream of being.

It would be simplicity itself to convince a few of their star-struck admirers to give up their seats...but no. Today she wanted time alone with her boyfriend. She cranked up her aura a notch and gave the girls her best publicity photo smile before turning back to Dean. If their admirers were going to stare, it was the least she could do to give them the glamour they were looking for.

Dean had already come to the same conclusion. "Shoot. The good seats are taken and the grass is still wet from the rain last night. Nowhere to sit. Want to go back inside?"

To hell with that. Being a superhero came with perks. "We're not eating inside on a day like this! Let's take a Skybox seat."

Victoria pointed straight up at the sky.

"Flying?" Dean raised an eyebrow. "Sounds risky to go that far for the sake of a lunch in the sun." He cleared his throat, raised his voice so that onlookers could hear. "Not all of us have superpowers to protect us, you know."

Victoria scoffed. It was Dean's obligatory ration of one public comment per day claiming that he didn't have superpowers. The PRT had suggested it as a way to firm up his secret identity while he dated Victoria, and he followed their advice religiously. What a boy scout.

"Afraid I'll drop you? Oh ye of little faith."

"Of course not, Victoria. I'm saying it can't be comfortable for you. Holding me up with one hand, eating your lunch with the other..."

Victoria smirked. "Well then, you'll just have to sit on my lap."

Dean chuckled. "I get it. You'll hold me tight in your arms, for safety of course, which means I'll have to feed you by hand. A win-win scenario."

"See, you get it." Victoria took a step forward...

...then stopped and turned to meet the eyes she sensed on her back. Brown eyes framed by freckles and frizzy brown hair. Jeez, she should have known. Her sister was watching them flirt.

Amy sat alone on the concrete sidewalk in the corner of the courtyard, a math textbook open on her lap. When Victoria met her gaze Amy quickly looked down at her book. As if to pretend that she had been studying all along. As if she hadn't been forlornly staring at her sister and her boyfriend.

Victoria sighed. Her sister was never comfortable with Dean. Amy did her best to disguise it. She tried to avoid him, she never spoke poorly about him behind his back. But Victoria couldn't miss her repressed grimaces when Dean came up in conversation, her disapproving glances whenever she saw them flirting.

Victoria hadn't been able to figure out her deal. Sometimes she thought that Amy had a crush on Dean that she was determined to hide. Other times Victoria got the vibe that Amy looked down on Dean, that she thought he _wasn't good enough_ to be Victoria's boyfriend. As if Dean had seduced her with superficial charms, his wealth and pedigree and emotion-sensing powers, and while beneath it all he was an evil beast whose craven heart of darkness would bring her to ruin. Or some such melodramatic nonsense.

It was ridiculous. Yeah, Victoria was way more _awesome_ than Dean any day of the week. She was well aware of that. Her superhero name was Glory Girl for a reason. But occasionally, when she was feeling especially honest with herself, she could admit that Dean was more _decent_ than her as a person. Dean had taken the name Gallant for a reason, too, and he did his damned best to live up to his name every minute of every day.

It was what made him so attractive. He was the only boy she had met who could truly stand up to her passion and force of personality. If she had suggested an airborne lunch to any other boy they would have accepted in an instant. A pack of feeble-minded yes-men. Her power only made it worse. It was all too easy to overwhelm the poor boys with her awe-inducing aura, unless she made a conscious effort to scale it back. And every time they dared to disagree with her opinions she could hear a faint quaver in their voice, the primal fear that she could snap them in half like a twig if they got on her bad side.

Dean was different. He wasn't intimidated by her high-flying passions, and he had the grounding to bring her back down to earth when need be. Yeah, it led them to fight sometimes, and that sucked, and the hard feelings never fully went away. But they had always made up and come back together afterward. She liked to think that they learned from each other and came out better people in the end. Some days she could even convince herself that they were more than just high school sweethearts, that they were destined for a more permanent relationship.

And Amy _knew_ all of this. She knew it better than anyone. Amy had never shied away from calling her out on her faults, and she wasn't half as diplomatic about it as Dean.

_"You're being unreasonable, Victoria. He dislikes your favorite band, but that doesn't make him a 'self-important pretentious asshole'._

_"You were supposed to write a five paragraph essay like the rest of us, Victoria. Not charm the teacher into giving you a B for a two paragraph essay with window dressing."_

_"You didn't have to shatter the mugger's knees, Victoria. No, no one is ever going to believe that was an accident."_

But there Amy was, sitting alone and glumly pretending to read a math textbook while she brooded over her sister's boyfriend, even though she knew damn well how high he ranked on the list of eligible candidates. It was depressing. Amy was such a worrier. And that made Victoria worry about her, too.

Victoria leaned forward and gave Dean's arm a squeeze. "Just a sec. I think my sister needs a dose of good cheer."

"Yeah. It's impossible to miss." said Dean. "I didn't want to say anything, because she doesn't like it when I read her, and..."

"Yeah, I get it. I'll be right back. Here, hold onto my lunch. Don't start without me."

Dean chuckled. "Why? You want to feed me by hand, too?"

Victoria rolled her eyes. "Yeah, sure thing, my most darling Dean. If I don't drop you first."

Victoria strode over to her sister. Amy didn't look up until her shadow covered her math textbook.

"Amy."

"Vicky."

Victoria leaned over her sister and made a show of examining her book. "Calculus sure is entertaining, huh. Congratulations on taking full advantage of lunch break."

"You know I don't have time to study after school. I'm due at the hospital at-"

Victoria put her hands on Amy's shoulders. Amy stopped and looked up at her.

"I know what you need, Amy." said Victoria.

Amy's eyes widened. "Um. And what is that?"

Victoria shifted her grip, took Amy under her arms, _lifted_, and-

And then they were flying through the air, hair blowing in the wind, making a circuit around the school grounds at a sedate twenty miles an hour.

Amy gave an undignified yelp but managed not to squirm. "Victoria! What the hell!"

"You need to cheer up! There's no better cure than a quick upsie-daisy and a fly around the block."

"When I was ten, maybe! Stop screwing around and put me down!"

"Oh, so you're saying you don't like it?"

Amy pursed her lips, and a hint of red came to her freckled cheeks. "No. It's nice..." She shook her head. "...it _would_ be nice if you gave me a warning instead of yanking me into the air like a lunatic. You're embarrassing me. Treating me like a child."

Victoria shifted her grip, moving Amy into a more comfortable bridal carry with practiced ease. "I'm not embarrassing you. I'm taking care of my sister. My awesome sister, who spends all day brooding over other peoples' boyfriends instead of finding bright spots to cheer about in her own life."

Amy didn't meet her eyes. She looked down at the school grounds, a a hundred feet below them.

"Come on, Amy. You're a superhero for God's sake. The world is your oyster. You just have to reach out and take it."

Amy chewed at her lip. "That's...not as easy as you make it sound. We can't all be you."

Victoria studied her face carefully. "Hey, look, you don't have a _condition_, do you? You're not depressed or anything like that?"

"I...no. I don't think so."

So Amy was seriously considering the idea. This was bad.

"Everything's going well at school? Not going to fail calculus?"

"I'm fine."

"No problems at the hospital?"

"Not...not really, no."

"So it's something at home, then, or..." A memory rose up in her mind. Oh, Ames. "You're still thinking about the bank thing."

Amy's lack of response was enough of a confirmation.

"You can't let that Tattletale girl get to you. Her power is literally the ability to be a mega bitch. If you let her get to you, then she wins."

"I know. You don't need to tell me."

"Look, Amy, I'm not going to ask you about the 'secret' you think Tattletale figured out. I'll just say that if this is about your bio-Dad, you're blowing it way out of proportion. Whatever your bio-Dad did doesn't reflect on you. He could be Allfather for all I care. Your _real_ dad is Mark Dallon, and he's a superhero."

"I don't want to talk about it."

Victoria sighed. "Okay. I won't make you talk about it. But remember that I'm here for you, okay? I'm your sister. You can trust me." She looked Amy in the eyes. "_I trust you._ One hundred percent. I don't keep secrets from you because I don't need to. So it _hurts_ me to see you like this. It hurts to watch you get yourself so twisted up inside, and you won't let me help because..."

_Because you don't trust me like I trust you._

Amy's face fell, her eyes wide and watery, on the edge of tears. Damn it. She hadn't meant to shame her. It just came out that way.

There was a long silence, with only the sound of the wind as they circled around the school grounds. Victoria studying Amy, Amy staring at her hands. Finally Amy muttered under her breath, barely louder than a whisper. "I might not deserve your trust."

_Damn it._ "You didn't do anything actually evil, did you? You didn't let someone die, or give someone cancer, or-"

"No! No, nothing like that!"

"Then they don't have anything on you. And they _won't_ have anything on you, because you won't do anything bad, because you're the most moral person I know. You're the one who's always telling me 'That's unnecessary force, Glory Girl!' 'That poor gangbanger doesn't deserve a punch in the face, Glory Girl!' Right?"

A little color came back into Amy's face. "Yeah, but-"

"Plus you're a healer, for chrissakes. You're practically a saint! I saw you take a punch from an alcoholic asshole after you couldn't save his daughter, and then you healed his fucking liver the next day!" Victoria felt her aura ratcheting up a notch. She took a breath. "So trust me. I know you. You're not going to do anything bad. And you're stubborn as hell, so nothing's ever going to change that."

Amy looked down at her hands for a long moment, then nodded. She turned back to Victoria and opened her mouth to speak...but no words came out. She simply stared straight ahead, mouth hanging open in shock.

Wait. Amy wasn't staring at her. She was staring at something _behind_ her. Victoria felt a shadow pass over them, and she spun in the air to see what it was. Her breath caught in her throat.

A great pale shape, silhouetted against the sun. A giant woman clothed only in wings. Wings of all shapes and sizes, wings sprouting from everywhere on her body.

_The Simurgh._

The Endbringer was close, close enough that her largest wing nearly brushed against them as she flew past them. She was moving at a steady clip toward Downtown, her face in profile, slate gray eyes aimed at her destination. For long seconds Victoria watched her flight, the Endbringer's wings flapping gently in a delicate dance without regard for lift or aerodynamics.

The Simurgh...hadn't seen them?

Victoria felt Amy trembling in her arms. She swallowed. "Amy. We have to find Mom and Dad-"

The Simurgh turned her head ever so slightly, as if to watch them out of the corner of her eye, and the air came alive with sounds.

A sickening, inhuman cry. Like a chorus of screams heard from a great distance, growing closer and louder with each second. The Simurgh's telepathic song that brought madness and disaster to all who heard it.

A piercing wail, from everywhere in the city. The air raid sirens. Why did they take so long to go off? They were supposed to have telescopes tracking the Simurgh twenty four hours a day, they were supposed to get _minutes_ of warning of her attacks!

A loud _crack_ from the ground, followed by dozens more. In seconds the air was filled with tree trunks, chunks of concrete, segments of chain link fence, all rising in a whirlwind to converge on them from every direction.

Victoria stared at the attack, frozen in place. She had fought telekinetics before, the Empire's Rune and Krieg, but it had been nothing like this.

"Victoria!" cried Amy.

Her sister's call jolted her into action. Victoria flew them up and away from the oncoming storm of debris. The storm turned to follow and it was _faster_. She juked in the air, managed to dodge a tree trunk by inches, then took a hit from a streetlight that shorted out her forcefield.

"Hold on Amy!" Victoria shifted her grip, hugged her screaming sister close and dove _through_ the edge of the whirlwind, trying to get down to ground level so she could use the school for cover. She dodged a chain-link fence, kicked aside a tree trunk, then rotated to protect Amy from a telephone pole that came spinning toward them from the side. Her forcefield came back up just in time to absorb the blow. Then she was in the clear, diving toward the school grounds-

And with a sickening _ripping_ sound, the school gymnasium tore away from its foundations and rose up to meet them.

Victoria had less than a second to react. She used it to spin in mid-air, putting her body between her sister and the oncoming threat. Then she felt a sharp crack against the back of her skull and the world went dark.


	2. Taylor 1

12:10 pm

I lay on the motel bed, chewing the remains of a sandwich and staring at the ceiling, trying to use the soft sounds of the television as a distraction from my racing thoughts. I had a disquieting sense of being trapped on a high precipice, looking over the edge at the long drop to the ground, and knowing there was nowhere to go but down. And there was no one, not a single person in the world, willing to help me.

I was alone.

I had cut my ties to school. Everyone there was a bully or an enabler. Not a single one would take my side. So I left and never went back. I hadn't been there in weeks.

I had cut my ties to Dad, too. I had been lying to him for months. I had even moved out of our house just to get away from him. Just the thought of going back to him, of admitting my lies, brought an oppressive tightness to my chest and a sickness to my stomach.

And yesterday I had nearly cut my ties to the Undersiders. They were my friends, or they _acted_ like friends...but they were okay with working for Coil, a villain who kidnapped children and drugged them into submission. And me? I wasn't okay with that. Completely incompatible.

Every one of those decisions had seemed like the right thing to do at the time. They were hard decisions, I felt guilty about every single one of them, but if I had to do them over I felt like I would still do the same thing.

But piece by piece, I had untethered myself from everything that made my life worth living. Without my family, without school, without my friends, without my team...what did I have left?

What the hell was I supposed to do?

The television wasn't working as a distraction. The news hour had reached the segment on crime, and all the top stories were ones I'd played a part in during my brief career as a villain. I had left the Undersiders in all but name, but I couldn't escape my responsibility for the crimes I committed.

* * *

The Brockton Bay police have announced the successful arrest of the last holdouts of the now-defunct gang, the Azn Bad Boys. The ABB collapsed when it's primary capes, the infamous villains Lung and Bakuda, were captured by the Protectorate and Wards. The villains are on track to be sent to the Birdcage as punishment for their crimes, with multiple counts of theft, drug-running, kidnapping, prostitution, murder, and attempted activation of weapons of mass destruction.

The ABB's remaining cape, Oni Lee, is still at large, but has shown no indication of reviving the gang. The PRT is offering cash rewards for information-

* * *

Hah. The news made it sound like the heroes saved the day. The same sort of story I heard over and over again as a child. The stories that inspired me to become a hero like them, fighting to improve the world.

But I knew it was a lie. The _villains_ had done most of the work. I had fought with them. We had put our lives on the line, just as much as any hero ever did, and we _won_. Raided the ABB drug labs, stole their assets, destroyed their Tinker's workshops, cut off Bakuda's toes, shot out Oni Lee's knee, humiliated Lung in battle and cut out his eyes to keep him down. The heroes only stepped in after we brought the ABB to it's knees. But somehow it was the heroes who got the credit in the public eye. The same deal as my first outing as a hero, when the Undersiders and I took down Lung and Armsmaster bullied me into giving him the credit.

Had my dream of being a hero been a lie all along? How many of my childhood inspirations were feats done by villains and independent capes, people who were just as courageous as the heroes but didn't have a PR machine or didn't want recognition?

* * *

The Forsberg Gallery has made a public call for donations to help repair the facilities that were damaged two weeks ago in a vicious and unprovoked attack by the criminal gang, the Undersiders. Those who make donations of $50 or greater are being offered-

* * *

A stab of guilt. It wasn't that I felt bad about breaking their building, exactly. It was the realization that I had _never_ felt bad about the damage I did to them, not even at the moment I was doing it. I had never even considered it.

I had taken the mission to get information about our mysterious boss. I had been entirely consumed by my thoughts about my undercover identity, getting the dirt on our boss, strategizing for the fight, fear of losing and getting captured. The damage we did to the gallery, and the fear we had planted in the innocents who attended, had barely been a consideration.

Had I pretended to be a villain for so long that I lost my ability to tell right from wrong?

* * *

The PRT is cooperating with the FBI to investigate the Medhall Corporation after it's CEO, Max Anders, was outed as the infamous villain Kaiser, leader of the white supremacist gang Empire 88. While many of the corporation's highly placed employees have been outed as gang members, sources close to the investigation say that there is no evidence that the company itself engaged in wrongdoing.

Medhall's shareholders issued a press release today insisting that the company is not liable for the criminal actions of its employees, and that they intend to continue business as usual during the investigation. Health care workers and consumer advocates breathed a sigh of relief at the news, as Medhall is the primary vendor of-

* * *

The news didn't mention that it was another one of Coil's plots. Taking down capes by outing their secret identities, getting the government to go after them and their families. The experienced capes had told me it was a dirty tactic, a violation of the 'unwritten rules'. And I could see why. The government had made the stupid decision to go after Purity's family and the villain had gone berserk, tearing down buildings, killing innocent bystanders, all in a crazy bid to get her infant daughter back. It was terrifying, the ugly violence that simmered beneath the 'cops and robbers' game we played.

* * *

This has been Nick Marshall, with the Crime and Punishment roundup.

Thank you Nick. Next up: fun in the sun! The sun is more fun for four than it is for one. Mayor Christner and the Department of Public Works have announced a new program to invigorate the beaches for the summer tourist season. As part of the program, participating beachside businesses will be offering family discounts to customers who bring their children with them to join in the fun...

* * *

I bit my lip. Left unmentioned on the news was the crime that weighed heaviest on my conscience.

Dinah Alcott.

It had been weeks since our bank heist, since Coil had _used_ us as a distraction to do his dirty work. He sent in his soldiers, stole the girl away from her family, strung her out on drugs, all so that he could use her precognitive powers to build his criminal empire.

I had only found out what he had done yesterday. And ever since, I had spent hours online reading everything I could about the girl I was responsible for enslaving. Her life, her family, the police efforts to find her that I knew would be in vain.

Dinah was the niece of Mayor Christner, the daughter of Amos and Abigail Alcott. Twelve years old, soon to graduate from her sixth grade class as Greenwoods Elementary. Described by her schoolfriends and teachers as a bright and joyful girl. Nothing like the shadow I had seen in Coil's base. A pale-faced ghost, wringing her hands, picking at her clothes until they fell apart. Making a visible effort to hold back her grimaces when Coil called her his 'pet', trying to please her keeper so that he would give in to her incessant begging for another shot of her 'candy'.

I had done truly despicable things in my undercover career as a villain. Menaced innocents with black widow spiders and made them fear for their lives. Taken the world's greatest healer hostage and held a knife against her throat. Cut off a woman's toes, gouged out an unconscious man's eyes. Every time I had convinced myself that it was worth it, that I was _in the right_, that I was doing the shitty things I did for greater good down the line. That I would make it up to everyone, somehow, when I turned in the Undersiders and became a hero.

But I couldn't rationalize what Coil was doing to Dinah. That would _never_ be right. I was going to save Dinah, if it was the last thing I did.

The problem was that I was _alone_. Against Coil's organization with money, soldiers, spies, and a dozen capes. Against my own _friends_, who knew me better than anyone.

What could I possibly do?

Accept the deal with the devil and keep working with Coil? He had made me an open-ended offer, said he would give me whatever payment I liked, within reason. There was a chance that I could convince him to release Dinah as his payment for my services, maybe even give up on kidnappings as a tactic altogether. Not likely. Dinah's power was too strong. Even if I sank into the depths of villainy, became his best cape and his right hand woman, I doubted I could offer him even a fraction of her value.

Attack Coil and steal her back? Even less likely. He kept Dinah close to him at all times, or sealed deep in his underground base. That meant I would have to beat his defenses in a head-on fight. But he had a small army of mercenaries and _multiple_ teams of capes at his beck and call. The Travellers, Circus and Trainwreck, Faultline's Crew if he chose to hire them for the job...and worst of all, the Undersiders. For all that they had acted like my friends, they would fight me to secure a paycheck. Tattletale had admitted as much.

Tip off the PRT? That had been the entire point of my undercover career, after all. But Coil was far better at that game than I was, terrifyingly effective. He had agents in every parahuman faction in the city, even in the PRT. Hell, Tattletale got direct feeds from the PRT surveillance cameras! Coil would have countermeasures in place and he would know the instant I approached the PRT. Hell, with Dinah's power, he would know hours or days _before_ I approached them. And even if I did run to the PRT and convince them to take me seriously, the combined forces of his capes rivaled anything the heroes could throw at him.

Looming over it all was Coil's own power to 'shape destiny'. I had no idea what the hell it was, other than some extremely abstract form of probability manipulation. I had never seen him fight but his costume was thin, skintight, unarmored, all speaking of an absolute confidence in his ability to avoid harm. There was no guarantee I could take him down in a straight fight even with the help of my bugs.

Besides, Coil refused to play by the unwritten rules, and that gave him a scary amount of leverage. His investigators had found out the secret identities of the Empire, an entire team of capes, and he had proven his willingness to exploit that knowledge to the full. He could do the same to the PRT. If I tipped off the authorities, would he simply blackmail them by threatening to out their capes to the public?

And...what if he came after Dad? Just thinking about it made my gut twist into knots. The Undersiders knew my civilian identity. I had shown them my face, told them my name and life story. I was pretty sure that Grue and Tattletale wouldn't tell Coil my identity, but Regent and Bitch struck me as the types who would sell out my family for a few thousand bucks of hard cash.

It was...the whole situation was...damn it. No matter how I turned it around in my mind, there wasn't a single point of weakness. There wasn't a single opportunity. I _refused_ to leave Dinah in his clutches, I could never bring myself to accept it, but, but...

I closed my eyes, pressed my palms against face and rubbed my forehead. Damn it. My feelings were a mess. My thoughts were running in endless circles. My head was aching, and I was starting to hear a faint, high-pitched buzz interrupting my thoughts, like a tinnitus at the back of my mind.

I got up from my bed and staggered to the bathroom. I got out my emergency medical kit and downed a dose of extra-strength tylenol. I looked at myself in the mirror, saw dark bags under my eyes. I hadn't gotten much sleep last night.

When all this was done, I swore that I would retire from being a cape. I would go back to Dad, get private schooling, and get on with my life as a normal woman. My career as a cape had been a giant mistake. I had followed my stupid, naive childhood dreams, and I had done far more harm than good.

My last act as a cape woud be to save Dinah. Somehow. I wouldn't abandon her. It was my fault she was kidnapped, and I was going to make it right.

That was the thought on my mind when the air raid sirens went off.

The news broadcast was abruptly cut off, replaced by an emergency broadcast. A set of three images, displaying in a cycle.

_Leave your homes. Evacuate the city. Follow the directions of local authorities._

The ground shook under my feet, in time with a series of muffled crashes and thumps from outside. Whatever it was, it was something bad enough to threaten the city. Another one of Coil's plots? A cache of bombs from Bakuda, left over as a final 'fuck you' after we took down the ABB?

I drew upon my bugs, searching for a source of the commotion. I had more range today for some reason, almost twice as much as usual, but my insects didn't find anything out of the ordinary in my vicinity, except for scores of people rushing about in a panic. Wait, there was a pattern. Most of the people were running in a certain direction, fleeing from something in the vicinity of Downtown.

I rushed outside to the parking lot in front of the motel to get a view of the threat with my own eyes. As I watched, a skyscraper in the distance shook, warped, and split in half, its top ten stories ripped off of the foundation. The skyscraper-top hovered in place for a second and then shot through the air to smash against the roof of the Forsberg Gallery, caving in its top floors and sending a rain of glass and debris to the streets below. Then, from behind the gallery, the cause of the disturbance floated into view.

A giant, pale woman clad in angel wings. The Simurgh.

I stared, paralyzed at the sight. I felt myself begin to shake. My headache throbbed and the high-pitched buzz in my head grew louder as a torrent of thoughts raced through my mind.

Oh God. I'm going to die.  
_No. It's the Simurgh. Death is the least she can do to you._

Why is she here? What target could she possibly have in Brockton Bay?

Dad! I need to go to him, help him evacuate-  
_What can you do for him? He's on the other side of the city. You'll never get there in time to help him._

I'm a cape, I'm a hero! I have to fight to protect my city.  
_What can you do to the Simurgh? Harass her with mosquitoes?_  
I want to join the Protectorate one day. They'll never forgive me if I run away from an Endbringer.  
_The Protectorate would tell you to evacuate. You can't hurt her, you'll just be another victim._  
I can help. I can use my bugs to find downed capes, do search and rescue-

I was brought back to reality by a massive barrage of missiles rocketing from the Bay. The space around the Simurgh was filled with explosions, clouds of shrapnel and superheated air. After a few seconds the smoke cleared to show that the Simurgh was barely damaged. The only sign that she had been attacked at all was a faint plume of smoke rising from one of her wings.

The Simurgh turned to face the attack and flew toward the source of the missiles. They must have been fired from Protectorate headquarters, their high-tech base floating in the water of the bay. Miss Militia's power, or conventional weapons stockpiled for an emergency.

I saw their strategy. Instead of fighting the Simurgh in the heart the city they were trying to lure her into a fight over the ocean, to buy time for the evacuation. Every minute they drew her away from the center of the city would save thousands of people from her curse.

Another volley of missiles fired and the Simurgh began to _dance_, swooping and twisting in the air at high speeds, evading the glowing missiles and the explosions blossoming around her with graceful twists of her body and gentle fluttering of feathers. The missiles pursued her relentlessly, an uninterrupted stream, but less than one in ten of them made a solid hit.

For seconds I could only stare. I had never seen anything like it. It was beautiful, almost mesmerising, a display that belonged in a ballet performance instead of a city-shaking battle. The Simurgh was practically taunting us with her untouchability. She seemed to relish in her display, flying toward the source of the missiles far slower than I would have expected, as if she wanted to prolong her performance...

...No. My mouth went dry as I realized _where_ the Simurgh was hovering. When the first volley of missles was fired, she had been practically on top of the construction site where Coil had built his underground base. And as she danced in the air she was diverting missiles into the construction site behind her, either dodging them or deflecting them with her telekinesis.

As I watched she narrowly dodged a pair of missiles, nearly brushing against them with her largest wing, and they were deflected into the middle of a skyscraper to her side. The top floors of the building slid off of their foundations and fell with an earthshaking crash, landing on the construction site and showering it with debris. The Simurgh didn't give it a single backward glance. She was making the damage look haphazard, incidental, as if it didn't serve any higher purpose.

The Simurgh was going after _Coil_? I thought the Simurgh targeted the greatest sources of hope and stability in the world. Did that mean that Coil was what he had claimed all along, a positive force for improving the city? Or was the Simurgh simply playing the same game as Coil, trying to take control of powerful capes like the Travellers, the Undersiders, and...

_Dinah_.

With a shock, I realized that this was it. Here and now. My first and last, my best and _only_ chance to rescue Dinah. She might have been killed by the redirected missiles and collapsed buildings, but if she survived...then Coil was weaker than ever before. He was dead, or trapped, or organizing a panicked evacuation. My bugs would give me an advantage in the chaos, letting me search the buried ruins of his base in seconds to find the survivors, letting me track the soldiers and capes as they evacuated and pick the perfect moment to snatch Dinah from their grasp.

I took a slow, steady breath to center myself, to try to calm my nerves. Right. My first instinct had been a good one. I would help in the fight, use my bugs for search and rescue. And the first person I was going to rescue was the poor girl who my conscience told me deserved it the most. I couldn't save Dinah from Coil, back then, but I was damned if I would leave her to be a victim of an Endbringer.

I ran back to my motel room and put on my costume in record time. Knife, baton, pepper spray, burner phone, all the rest. After a moment's hesitation, I unlocked the closet and pulled out my duffel bag of cash. I didn't have a car, but even during a Simurgh attack I bet I could find someone willing to give me a five minute car ride for the two hundred and fifty grand I had earned as a villain.

As I hurried to the door I heard a series of cracking sounds in the distance. More buildings being demolished. The sounds were quieter than before, but accounting for muffling from the walls of the room, the damage was probably just as bad-

Wait. The walls of the motel room muffled sounds from the outside. The collapsing buildings, the explosions, the air raid sirens, all of it. My headache was gone, too, banished by my rush of adrenaline.

But the faint, high-pitched buzz, the tinnitus in the back of my mind, was still going at full volume.

My blood ran cold. The Simurgh's scream.

She was _speaking_ to me. Speaking into my mind from a mile and a half away. And if I went to Coil's base I would have to get closer to her. Her scream would get louder and stronger. Strong enough to drive me to insanity in minutes. If she got to me, I...I didn't know exactly what would happen, but I wouldn't be myself anymore. The heroes would kill me, or seal me in quarantine, put a dove tattoo on my hand and treat me like I was radioactive waste, a danger to everyone around me.

I didn't know exactly how much time I would have. I wished I had read the PRT fact sheets more carefully. As far as I remembered, the time limit for exposure was in the neighborhood of an hour at long range and twenty minutes at close range. Which meant that in the worst case, once I got to Coil's base I would have twenty minutes to get inside, rescue Dinah, and make my getaway. That was cutting it close. I had already used my bugs on my first visit to his base, gotten the lay of the land, but...

I clenched my fists. It might be hard. It might even be impossible. But I didn't have any other choice. I had had enough of moral compromises, dirty deals and undercover work. For the first time since I got my powers, I would act like a true hero. I would save Dinah, I would defend the city, or I would die trying.


	3. Victoria 2

12:25 pm

Victoria awoke. It was dark. She tried to open her eyes but her eyelids were too heavy to move. Someone was cradling her, gentle hands supporting her head, while the rest of her body laid on a hard, uneven surface. There was something thick and wet smeared over the right side of her face.

"Vicky! Vicky wake up, wake up, stay with me! You have to stay with me this time, Vicky!"

It was Amy. Her sister was practically screaming in her ear. Something was wrong with her. Her voice was panicked, frenzied, shaking. She had never heard her like this. Victoria tried to reassure her but her voice came out as an indistinct murmur.

"_Fuck_, no, no, wake up! _Listen_, Vicky. I fixed your body, your skull, everything else but your brain is swelling and I can't fix it. We're trapped, you have to pull yourself together and fly us out of here, understand? You have to wake up!"

She tried to speak again but the effort was too much. She felt herself slipping away, sensations disappearing one by one. The hard surface against her back, the wet liquid against her face, and finally Amy's voice faded out, losing the words, losing the intonation, until all that was left was a strangled shriek, like an opera singer carrying a neverending high-pitched note...

...  
...

Victoria awoke. She opened her eyes but all she could see was a light gray blur moving in front of a dark gray blur. Someone's face? She tried to move but her limbs felt detatched, lifeless, almost numb.

"Victoria. Please. Please. Please stay awake."

Victoria felt warm arms around her and realized what had happened. She was hurt. But her amazing sister was here to fix her. Her sister named...named...whatever. It didn't matter. Everything was going to be okay now. Victoria smiled and let herself relax.

"Vicky, listen. I fixed everything else but I can't fix your brain, I'm giving you morphine for the pain, adrenaline and half a dozen other things to keep you awake, but I can't fix your brain for you, understand? It's bad, it's going to keep getting worse unless you pull yourself together!"

Victoria's smile turned into a frown. Something was wrong. Her sister was supposed to take care of her when she got hurt, but now she was just saying words at her. She had to remind her sister what to do. She tried to speak.

"Fiii, Fiiiii-"

The words wouldn't come out right. Her sister started sobbing. No, no. Don't be sad. Victoria tried again, painstakingly sounding out each syllable.

"Fix. Me. Please."

Her sister cried. "I can't. _I can't_. Please. You have to get up."

Victoria tried to understand what was wrong. A faint memory came to mind. That's right. Her sister got sad sometimes and needed someone to believe in her so she could get better. Victoria spent long seconds searching for the right words, then spoke them one by one.

"You can do it. I trust you."

"_I can't!_ You lost, um. I, I can't reconstruct it all, I would have to work from my own base as a starting point and oh God, it's," her voice broke. "You have to _understand_, Vicky, I've got _bad blood_ and I can't _do_ that to you-"

Her sister wanted her to understand, but she couldn't do it. Too many words spilling out too fast. And it was hard to hear her sister's words over the people singing in the background. Victoria focused on the gray blur above her and moved her lips into a smile.

"I trust you."

Then her eyelids grew heavier, and the world went dark again.

...  
...

Victoria awoke. She was lying on the ground, a hard surface against her back. She felt hazy, unfocused, a faint sense of bliss and well-being tinging her thoughts. It reminded her of the painkillers Amy had given her after a particularly nasty brawl with Night.

"What..." She blinked. "Where are we?"

Amy was crouching above her. She seemed...tense. Relieved and anxious in equal measure.

"Arcadia High. The roof collapsed in the gym."

"The stars are out. It's night already?"

Amy shook her head. "We're buried down here so I made us some lights. Bioluminescent bacteria."

Victoria smiled. "You are absolutely amazing."

"Um. Thanks. Listen, Vicky. You took a hit to the head, so I want to make sure you're, um fully recovered, before we go. I'm going to ask you some questions, okay?"

"Damn. Okay, shoot."

"What's the current date?"

"May sixteen, twenty eleven."

"Good. Do you know my name? Do you know who I am?"

Victoria gave her a look. "Seriously? You're scaring me. I feel fine."

"Just tell me." snapped Amy.

"Amy Dallon. _Amelia_ Dallon. You're my sister. Not by blood, but I love you all the same."

Amy let out a deep sigh, her whole body shaking with palpable relief. "Good. Very, very good. Who are our parents? What do they do?"

"Carol and Mark. Mom's a lawyer, and they're Brandish and Flashbang."

"That's good. A few more detail checks. What's your favorite soda? Your homeroom teacher? Your favorite hero? Your boyfriend's car?"

"Diet Coke. Miss Grimsley. Alexandria." said Victoria. Then she smirked. "And _boyfriend?_ That's a trick question. I don't have one, obviously."

Amy brought a hand up to cover her mouth. "Oh God."

"Jeez. Don't act so surprised that I got them all right."

"Shit. Um. Okay. One more question. Do you know Dean Stansfield?"

"Yeah, of course. He's Gallant. My best friend on the Wards."

"Best friend? Is that how you'd describe him?"

"...yes? He's kind and brave, and he doesn't let his wealth go to his head." When Amy didn't respond, she continued. "What, did Dean turn villain while I was out? He puts his foot in his mouth way too often for an empath, but I never thought-"

"No! Nothing like that. Damn. I didn't get everything. I'm sorry. I'll...I'll fix it later. Good enough for now."

"What's wrong?"

"I'll tell you later. We have to get out of here, as soon as you're up to it."

"Right. Was anyone else hurt? I keep hearing this sound, like people calling to me from outside, only it sounds almost like they're screaming-" Victoria tried to get to her feet, but she felt a pressure in her skull and the world blurred around her.

"Careful, careful." Amy touched Victoria's cheek. "You've still got the drugs I put in your system. It'll take me a minute to get you back in shape."

Victoria smiled and rubbed her cheek against her sister's hand. "Mmm, but these drugs feel nice. I could get used to this."

Amy let out a nervous laugh. "Oh, God. It's so good to have you back, Vicky. I was scared to death. I love you."

"Love you too, Ames. More than all the stars in the sky." said Victoria. She pushed herself up with one arm, leaned forward, and kissed Amy on the cheek.

Amy blushed, her entire face going red. Lit up like a Christmas tree, practically bioluminescent.

Victoria smirked and caressed Amy's blushing face. "God, just look at you. It must be a sin to have a girlfriend this cute. But if it is, I don't mind being damned."

She leaned in to kiss her girlfriend again, more thoroughly this time...only to see her frozen in place. Staring at her like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck.

Victoria drew back and wrinkled her brow. "What's wrong, love?"

Amy shuddered, jerked away from her. "No! No, no, no-"

"What's wrong? I don't understand-"

"Fuck, fuck, fuck! I fucked up. I am so, so sorry. I'll fix it, I promise-"

Amy touched her on the arm and everything went dark.

...  
...

Victoria awoke. She was lying on the ground, a hard surface against her back. She felt hazy, unfocused, a faint sense of bliss and well-being tinging her thoughts. It reminded her of the painkillers Amy had given her after a particularly nasty brawl with Hookwolf.

"Victoria. How are you feeling?"

Amy was crouching above her. She seemed...tense. Angry.

"What happened? It's so dark. I can barely see."

"I'm healing you. Answer the question. How are you feeling?"

"I'm fine. Wait, fuck. My legs. I can't move my legs." Victoria pushed herself up on her elbows. She was wearing the fancy dress she had bought on the Boardwalk, with a score of bloodstained rips scattered along the fabric. Her legs looked normal, healed from whatever hit her, but... "What happened to me?"

"I had to keep you still for the healing. Just in case." Amy scowled at her and touched her cheek. The wrinkles on her face made her look twenty years older, almost grotesque.

Victoria felt her heart leap in her chest. There was something deeply wrong here.

"You _paralyzed_ me? What the hell, Amy? Let me go!" Victoria tried to move her legs again, but only succeeded in activating her power and hovering a few inches above the ground.

"I'll fix it. Calm down. Your stress hormones are cascading, positive feedback. I went too far trying to reverse what I did. God, I should have listened to you and practiced this before an emergency came up."

Practiced this? What was she talking about...oh no.

"You did something to my brain, didn't you." Victoria exerted her power to _jump_ out of her sister's grasp, floating a foot and a half in the air. "What the fuck, Amy? _What the fuck did you do to me?_"

"No, wait, Vicky!" Amy stretched out a hand to touch her arm, but her touch was _repulsive_, thousands of tentacles sliding over her, trailing a river of slime and filth-

Victoria let out a strangled scream and jumped back again, as far as she could go until she slammed into a wall of fallen debris. Amy was _wrong_, eyes like burning coals, oh God how come she never realized she had a _demon_ for a sister! Get away get away get away-

The demon reached for her again and her aura spiked and the demon collapsed, slapped to the ground as if it was hit by a physical force, so she used her power and tried to break through the wall and escape but the demon reached up with a trembling claw and touched her leg-

...  
...

Victoria awoke. She was lying on the ground, a hard surface against her back. She felt hazy, unfocused, a faint sense of bliss and well-being tinging her thoughts. It reminded her of the painkillers Amy had given her after a particularly nasty brawl with Allfather.

"Victoria. How are you feeling?"

Amy was crouching above her. She seemed...tense. Nervous, afraid.

"Mmm. Feel nice. A little..." Victoria yawned. "A little tired. It's so dark. Are you okay?"

"I'm healing you and we're on a time limit. Promise me you'll stay calm, okay?"

"'Kay."

"Good. I'm going to ask you some questions now."

"'Kay."

"Do you have a boyfriend?"

"Dean Stansfield. He's on the Wards."

"Good. How much do you like him? Do you love him?"

"He's sweet, he's brave, I like him a lot. We fight a bit, though. Do I _love_ him?" Victoria blinked, raised an eyebrow. "Do you even need to ask?"

"_Answer the question._ Doctor's orders."

"Wow, calm down. Let me put it this way. Dean's not _the one_ for me. We talked it over, we'll probably stick with each other until graduation, but we're not going to get married and live happily ever after." Victoria gave a thin smile. "I'll have to wait for someone else to sweep me off my feet after graduation."

"That's, um. That's good. Let me think." said Amy. She turned away and muttered to herself. "It sort of fits, but...fuck, why didn't I ever ask her?...if I hadn't been a stupid coward..."

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing. Next question. What's your relationship with me?"

"That's easy. You're my sister."

"Sister? That's all?"

Victoria smirked. "Fine. You're my wonderful, beautiful, amazing sister. Done fishing for compliments?"

Amy gave a nervous laugh. "Thanks. Um, did you ever kiss me?"

"Sure. We're family, of course we kiss."

"No. Um." Amy looked down and wrung her hands. "Did you ever kiss me in a...different way? A way that means-"

"Ah. A way that means more than just family? _Romantically?_" Victoria chuckled. "I can't believe I'm hearing this from you, Amy."

"Okay, okay. I was just checking."

"Yeah, we're not at that stage of our relationship yet."

Amy went still. "Yet?"

"Didn't we talk about this a million times? You're so fussy. Mom and Dad are a hundred percent okay with us being together, but you still insist on doing everything the traditional way. Slow and oh so _proper_." Victoria gave her a stern look. "You know, I still can't believe you want us to save ourselves until we get married. It's like you're from the eighteenth century."

"Oh. Oh God." Amy reached out and touched her on the cheek. "Hold still. Do you remember when you started feeling, um, that way about me?"

"The same age as you did. You were my heart's first desire. That was when we made our promise." Victoria smiled, stroked the back of Amy's hand that was on her cheek. "But even before that, I think I always had a bit of a crush on my cool sister."

Victoria studied her sister's face, looking for her approval, but strangely she didn't return her affection. Instead Amy's eyes went wide and she started muttering to herself again, not even bothering to disguise it. "Fuck, it's too deep, _integrated_ now, overwritten too much...could just rewrite it all but that's like killing her...got to find the right tweaks, make sure they're stable..."

_Like killing her._ Victoria forced herself to stay calm, to take a deep breath. "Amy, you're scaring me. Am I dying?"

"No! Never. I screwed up healing you, but I'll fix you. I promise."

_Amy screwed up._ Amy wasn't supposed to screw up. Victoria forced herself to take another breath. "Okay. Is there something wrong with my head? 'Cause I've been hearing this weird noise in my head, like there's people talking to me but I can't quite make them out, and it's getting louder-"

"No. That's not me. That's the Simurgh. Sssh, let me think."

_That's the Simurgh._ It took a few seconds to process that. Victoria took a deep breath, and...no. Fuck no she was not going to remain calm. "I'm listening to the fucking Simurgh? Amelia Claire Dallon, if you're joking I'm seriously going to-"

"I need to think! I'm going to fix you, I promise! I read the regs, we have seven minutes of exposure left before-"

"Are you seriously doing healing tweaks on me during a _Simurgh attack?_ That's insane! You can do it later!" Victoria tried to get to her feet, found that her legs wouldn't move. "What the hell are you doing to me? We need to go right fucking now-"

Victoria felt a faint tingling where her sister's hand touched her cheek, and everything went dark.

...  
...

Victoria awoke and snapped into a state of high alert. A list of information flashed to the front of her mind, practically glowing and in capital letters.

_The Simurgh attacked Arcadia High. She and Amy are trapped in a crevice under rubble in the gym. She was badly hurt and Amy fixed her. She doesn't know what happened to the other capes. The cell phone network is down so they can't call for help. The light in the crevice is from Amy's bioluminescent bacteria. The-_

"Vicky. We have to go. I'll...I'll finish healing you later. We've been exposed for-"

"Right. Six minutes left at this intensity." Victoria winced at the unearthy scream in her head. Had to get away fast. She rolled over onto her hands and knees, crawled toward Amy. "Get ready for a cannonball, like we practiced with Uncle Neil."

A tactic they had designed for breaking out of confined spaces. The goal was for Victoria to use her invulnerability to protect Amy from the force of breaking out and from the debris she knocked loose. Amy curled up into a ball, making herself as small as she could. Victoria climbed on top of her, wrapped her arms and legs around her to get a grip, and then floated them up in the air, until Victoria's back was touching the roof of the crevice. Victoria exerted force upward, gave the roof a few tentative pushes to test it's strength. Then she _lifted_ up with all her power. The collapsed ceiling supports above them give only a brief resistance before yielding with a telltale _crack_, spraying debris in all directions.

Victoria flew them a hundred feet up before she slowed to a stop. She carefully adjusted her posture, moving to sit cross-legged on thin air and shifting Amy to sit comfortably in her lap. From her vantage point in the air, she looked out at the city of Brockton Bay.

She saw a disaster.

Arcadia High was a ruin. The buildings had been torn apart, ripped from their foudations, and from the trees on fire and smoking craters the school grounds must have been peppered with high explosives. Attempts to hit the Simurgh, redirected to kill civilians.

The trail of devastation continued across the city and led Downtown. More than half of the skyscrapers were missing their top stories, ripped from their moorings by the Simurgh's telekinesis, or shattered by impacts from other buildings that she had used as projectiles.

Then there were the _bodies_. The bodies lying still and silent, bodies lying in pools of blood or impaled by telekinetically thrown projectiles, the limbs vainly reaching out from under piles of debris...

Tears came to her eyes. A year after she and her sister got her powers, Mom and Dad had trained them for S-class threats. They had made them watch footage of Endbringer attacks so they would know what they were getting into, so that they wouldn't be overwhelmed when the time came to fight. She had seen cities burned by Behemoth, drowned by Leviathan, driven mad by the Simurgh.

But this was here, now. Her city. Her school. Did her friends make it out? Her cousins Eric and Crystal? Her friends on the Wards, Dean and Dennis and the rest? Did they even get a chance to fight back, or were they killed before they knew what hit them?

Amy finally spoke, her voice trembling. "Mom and Dad. Do you think they got away? Or are they fighting now, and-"

There was a loud crash and a rumble from Downtown. The Simurgh came into view, using two levitated buildings as shields against an assault by a swarm of flying capes.

The flyers let loose a fusillade of Blaster attacks, beam weapons and space-distortions and explosives, and were joined by twice as many attacks coming from the ground. The buildings were quickly torn apart and one of the Simurgh's larger wings broke off of her body, falling through the air. The Simurgh returned the favor. Her severed wing halted its fall in midair, caught by her telekinesis, and then accelerated into the midst of the flying capes, whirling like a scythe and cutting them down.

A group of the flyers broke off to fight the Simurgh's wing while the rest kept up their onslaught on her body. She danced around their attacks, taking hits every second but dodging the worst of them, as she ripped another pair of buildings from the ground to serve as a new defense.

Victoria realized that something was wrong, even _more_ wrong than a normal Endbringer attack. There were so many capes in the fight! There had to be more than fifty just counting the ones in the air. Where did they all come from? Did the Protectorate even have that many flyers? Besides, the Protectorate was only supposed to fight the Simurgh with a handful of capes at a time, to limit their exposure to her song. The top brass only gave the order to go all-in if something seriously bad was going down.

Victoria itched to join the fight. Her instincts as a hero, a swelling urge for justice and vengeance for the fallen. It was the _right_ thing to do, and she knew exactly how to do it. She had trained for Endbringer attacks with her family and the rest of New Wave. They had strategies for attack and defense, tactics for rescuing downed capes and bringing them to her sister to heal them. They had promised to fight together to defend their city.

But there was no time. They only had five minutes left to escape the Simurgh's curse. It was scary to think about. She didn't _feel_ crazy, but the Simurgh's victims didn't necessarily feel anything different about themselves. One day she might start planning robberies, terrorist attacks, assassinations, all the while believing that she was doing them for the right reasons.

"Let's get out of here." said Victoria. She shifted her grip on Amy for high-speed flight, holding her sister in a tight hug, and prepared to fly-

Victoria hesitated. Amy was trembling, shaking like a leaf. Damn it. She must be having the same thoughts about the Simurgh, and it would be much worse for her. Amy had always been a worrier. Afraid that she had _bad blood_, afraid that she would follow her unknown father's footsteps into villainy. She needed a morale boost to keep herself going.

Victoria leaned forward, rested her head against her sister's, and whispered in her ear. A reminder of the bright future ahead of them. "Trust me, Amy. We'll make it. Remember our promise. I love you more than the stars in the sky."

Amy shuddered and closed her eyes. "Okay. I...I trust you."

Victoria accelerated as fast as she dared, going from zero to seventy miles an hour in seconds. She flew straight away from the Simurgh, heading north to the Docks. The Simurgh's song had a radius of miles but it weakend with distance, and she knew from practice that it took her less than two minutes of sustained flight to get out of the city limits. The PRT would be setting up a quarantine barrier around the city - there, she could see the military convoys in the distance - and if they could make it out in time...

They made it a mile away, the song fading to half its intensity, before she was interrupted by a flash of light to the West and a shout from a familiar voice.

"Victoria! Amy! Thank God you're alive!"

"Mom!"

Carol Dallon, Brandish, was standing on an empty street in the Docks, near the outskirts of the city. She waved, beckoning to them. "Down here, hurry!"

Victoria shouted to make herself heard over the distance. "No, Mom! We were exposed, time's almost up! We have to get away!"

"_No!_ Get down here _now!_ There's something important you need to know!" Brandish looked exhausted, leaning her right side against the wall of a building for support.

Victoria hesitated, glanced at the flurry of activity around the Simurgh in the distance, then landed on the street. "We have to go! We can talk on the way out. Do you need a lift?"

Brandish coughed, a hoarse sound from deep in her throat. "The Simurgh pulled something new. I need your help. Come here, quickly."

Something was wrong. Brandish was wearing white, but not her usual New Wave uniform. She wore a loose-fitting T-shirt, white khaki pants, and no socks or shoes. Her clothing and hands were spattered red with blood, and her right hand clutched at the side of her face. Brandish moved her hand away-

Oh God. The entire right side of her face was misshapen, deformed and bloody. Tumorous growths sprouting out of her skin like popcorn, covering her right eye and sealing shut the right side of her mouth. The same growths dotted the exposed skin of her arms and feet. Her right leg was twisted in an awkward posture, not quite supporting her weight.

Amy squirmed out of Victoria's grip and rushed to her side. "Oh no. What happened? Let me heal you!"

Brandish gave a pained half-smile and limped forward to meet her. "Of course. Come here. This won't take more than a second."


	4. Taylor 2

12:29 pm

"Coming up here. Here! Stop!"

I had to shout to my motorcycle's driver to be heard over the din. Downtown was filled with the roar of car engines and honking horns, the yells of evacuating families trying to stay together in the crush of the crowds, the cries of the people who were dying in the rubble of collapsed buildings, the louder cries of the grieving survivors.

And underneath it all was the Simurgh's scream in the back of my head, an endless cacophany of warbling shrieks. The Simurgh had taken the Protectorate's bait, flown out into the bay to tear apart their floating base, but her song was still twice as loud here as it had been in the motel.

I would have to be conservative with my time. Twenty minutes to get in, get Dinah, and get out. Any longer than that, and...and I didn't want to think about the consequences.

I jumped off the backseat of the motorcycle before it came to a full stop and ran without looking back. I shouted my thanks to the driver as I ran. He had been a godsend. Cars were useless, gridlocked by the sheer density of evacuees and car crashes, but with his motorcycle he had managed to navigate the streets. I left the man my duffel bag of cash. A quarter of a million dollars. An exorbitant price at any other time for less than five minutes of work.

I already knew where I was going. I had been using my power to gather insects ahead of me, selecting the best species for scouting and search and rescue. Houseflies, dragonflies, mosquitoes, beetles in the air. Cockroaches, millipedes, and legions upon legions of ants underground.

The damage to Coil's base made it easier for me to search. The impacts from missiles and collapsing buildings had shaken bugs loose from their underground burrows and opened cracks in the walls, giving them countless entrances to infiltrate the base's otherwise sterile corridors. I could sense the entirety of the base, every nook and cranny.

What I found was a disaster area. The surface was a wreck, the construction site pocked with craters and wrecked fragments of skyscrapers. The underground was even worse. The surface impacts alone weren't nearly enough to explain the maze of twisting passages and buried crevices Coil's base had become. The Simurgh must have been using her telekinesis on the base directly, to rip apart the foundations and collapse ceilings.

The base was filled with people trapped inside. At least thirty people alive and active, and twice as many bodies that lay still and unmoving. I sent my insects to each one, trying to determine their identities, to gauge my allies and opposition. Who were the survivors? Were the Undersiders there? The Travellers?

Most of all, where was Dinah?

While my underground insects searched for survivors, my surface insects searched for an entrance. I could sense nine separate underground exits, many of them apparently designed as boltholes for emergencies, but every single one of them had been sealed off by collapses and rubble. The Simurgh's handiwork?

The only way in was through a missile impact crater on the far side of the construction site. The crater had opened a large hole into an underground room. The room was filled with debris, but the way it had fallen created a long, twisting passage that led to the intact parts of the facility where the survivors were clustered. What was strange was that the survivors weren't using the passage to evacuate. There were fourteen corpses lying on the floor, but not a single living person trying to traverse it.

I had an inkling of the reason. There was a dead zone in the entrance room, roughly twenty feet in diameter, where my bugs were unable to reach. Any bugs I sent into the zone were sucked into a soft, sticky substance and the disappeared from my senses. And the walls and debris that touched the dead zone were being periodically pushed, hammered with heavy impacts. A parahuman? Some kind of Tinker device the survivors were using to tunnel out?

My bugs told me where to go for answers. I climbed over a collapsed fence into the construction site and jogged over to the small crowd standing clustered around the entrance crater.

The Travellers. Trickster, immediately identifiable in his red mask and top hat. Sundancer and Ballistic, their heavy hitters. With them was a strikingly handsome man wearing civilian clothes - one of Genesis' forms?

Trickster was crouching at the lip of the crater, smoking a cigarette and raising his voice to talk to someone inside. The parahuman making the dead zone?

"I get it, Noelle, I get it one hundred percent, but fighting isn't an option." said Trickster. "If we do that, _everyone_ loses and the Simurgh wins. We'd be playing right into her hands."

A deep, echoing voice replied. "...fake angel is _following_ us, won't let me rest...hate her so much! I'll kill her this time!"

A massive impact shook the base. The rubble in the entrance room shifted but stayed in place.

"I wish we could, Noelle, but it won't work. The best capes in this world have tried for a decade and haven't come close. It sucks, I hate it as much as you do, but we need to run. I'll get us out of here, we'll grab Coil and his precog for protection from her plans-"

"Don't you see, Krouse? There's no way out. We keep to ourselves, she wins. We get protection, she flies in and kills them! She won't let us rest until she's dead or we are!"

The handsome man spoke up. "Don't give up, Noelle. Please. We're a team, we'll make it as long as we stick together. Remember our promise."

An ugly sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "Our promise isn't worth a thing if we're dead! She took Chris, she took Cody, now she took Jess...so tired of living like this...I want to _end_ it, Krouse, here and now, one way or the other."

Another massive impact in the base.

The Travellers finally noticed me as I approached the lip of the crater.

"Skitter." said Ballistic. "Didn't expect to see you here."

"I came to help. Are the Undersiders down there? Coil?"

Ballistic nodded. "They're all down there. I can't say they're alive."

"How about-" I hesitated. They had been talking about grabbing Dinah, treating her like a prize to be won. I couldn't let them know I was here to set her free, but if I made it sound like I was in the same boat... "How about his precog? I'm kind of counting on her for something personal."

"I assume she's down there too. If you want to help, wait here with us. Our teammate Noelle is digging them out."

Noelle? They had another member? "There's a zone down there where my bugs get killed. That's her?"

"Got it. She's big and super strong but she got stuck, impaled on a few I-beams. Doesn't matter how strong you are if you don't have leverage. Might take her a few minutes to get through."

This Noelle had a serious Brute rating, if being impaled by I-beams was a minor inconvenience. In other circumstances I would dig for information about the new cape, but...

"No time to spare. I'm going in now." I said. I started climbing down the crater, but Trickster ran forward to stop me with a hand on my shoulder.

"Whoa, whoa. It's dangerous. Wait for Noelle to finish."

"I'll be fine. There's an open passage curved around her." I gestured, indicating the path. "Maybe too narrow for you, but I can squeeze by."

Trickster shook his head, gripped my shoulder tighter. "You don't get it. Noelle's power is extremely dangerous, touch activated. Your bugs die when they touch her, right? Your bugs tell you about the bodies on the floor down there? You'd better wait."

"Shit." But her power didn't 'kill' the rubble around her, so... "Touch activated. Does it need skin contact? My costume covers everything."

"Your hair's not covered."

"Her power activates on hair contact?"

"Don't know. We never tested it because we like this little thing called _being alive_."

"I...you know what, fine. I'll cut off my hair. Problem solved." I shook off his arm, reached into the holster in my belt and pulled out my combat knife. My insects found a scrap of cloth on the other side of the site that I could fashion into a covering for the back of my head. I commanded them to bring it to me.

Trickster pursed his lips behind the mouth-hole of his mask. "Look, Skitter. You're not getting it. Noelle's power is bad news. Going down there now is most likely going to get you killed, or else get one of _us_ killed. Best not to risk it."

His attitude was pissing me off. "Stop fucking with me, Trickster! _You're_ not getting it. Who the hell are you to tell me to give up on my friends?" He didn't reply, and I turned back to the crater. "There's no time. I'm going in."

Trickster flipped his cigarette to the ground. "I'm not sure we can let you do that."

I tensed for a fight. I didn't like my chances. I couldn't beat the Travellers alone, I would have to make a run for it. But if Trickster had a free line of sight he could keep me away from the crater indefinitely. His power let him swap the locations of any two objects he could see that had similar size and mass. I reached out to my insects and found that I had already unconsciously drawn them into position to counter his power. One squad gathered on the ground behind him, ready to jump him as a distraction, another group inside the base near the crater, ready to fly up to form a wall and screen off his vision-

A deep voice came from inside the crater. "Skitter, is it? The girl with the bugs?"

"Yes." I said, not taking my eyes off Trickster. "Nice to meet you, Noelle. Think you can let me through?"

"...you smell strong. Strongest one I know...Come down. I'll make sure my power doesn't hurt you."

_Smelling_ me? I didn't know what she was talking about but I wasn't about to question my good fortune.

"Thanks Noelle. Coming down now." I looked for footholds on the lip of the crater, then carefully lowered myself down and into the rubble-filled passage below.

The Travellers watched me go as if I was a condemned man walking to the gallows. Not reassuring.

Trickster called out behind me. "I know what you're thinking, Noelle, but you don't want to do this. She's only got bugs, she can't hurt the Simurgh."

"You did this to me, Krouse! You _owe_ me this. Or else the Simurgh did this to me, and we'll kill her. We can't let her push us around forever!"

I started down the passage. The only light was a dim trickle of sunlight from the crater opening I had come through. My bugs helped me navigate the irregular floor of the passage, covered with rubble and dead bodies. My insects informed me that most of the bodies were stark naked and grotesquely mangled. An effect of Noelle's power? I set my jaw and tried not to think about it.

After ten paces I came face to face with Noelle. In a manner of speaking. As my eyes adapted to the dim light I saw that the 'dead zone', the right side of the passage, was a massive wall of living flesh, covered in bestial paws, mouths, and eyeballs of all sizes. The eyeballs turned to watch me as I passed, and one of the mouths licked its lips.

"Um. Hi, Noelle." I said.

"Hi. Watch out." she said, speaking with three mouths at once. Her paws tensed, and then she jolted in place, shaking the room and sending loose debris raining down on me. I stifled a scream and shielded my head with my arms until the debris settled.

"Noelle, can you, um, wait to let me through? I'll only be a minute."

"Hurry." she said.

I made it two steps forward before my foot slipped on the remains of a half-melted corpse. I reached for the safe side of the passage to brace myself-

The Simurgh's scream in my head intensified, reached a peak, and an earthquake hit. My bugs felt the quake ripple through the ground, moving away from the bay. The aftershock of an attack being used against the Endbringer.

I stumbled, lost my balance, and landed on Noelle's wall of flesh. Her skin was sticky to the touch, and the parts of my body that touched her sank directly into her flesh as if it was a very thick, viscous gel. I tried to move away, only to find that the back of my head was _adhering_ to her flesh, literally stuck inside. After a few frantic seconds of struggle I managed to work myself free and threw myself to the floor of the passage.

"Sorry." said Noelle.

I gasped and pulled myself to my feet. Then flinched away from her as something long and wet snaked out of her flesh and _licked_ the back of my head.

"Sorry." she said. "Force of habit. You taste strong."

"N-no problem." I shuddered and picked up my pace.

As I half-walked, half-crawled my way down the passage, I was working with my bugs to identify the survivors. The first thing I checked for were young girls, about twelve years old. No matches.

_Damn it._ Dinah wasn't here. But someone here would know. Coil, or Tattletale, or...

Coil was in what I took to be a computer room, sealed off from the other survivors by an airtight metal door, probably locked. There were tall closets in walls that were similarly sealed off, vaults that my bugs couldn't penetrate. Coil was in front of a bank of computer screens, typing madly on a keyboard and occasionally pulling servers and data drives out of a rack and stuffing them in a duffel bag. He must have a special-purpose power system to still be getting power for his computers. One of the sleeves of his costume was torn off, and the arm underneath was wet with blood.

The Undersiders were in a mostly-intact conference room down the hallway. They were joined by a group of Coil's employees, six men and three women, carrying varying degrees of military equipment and weapons. The Undersiders were in poor shape. Grue, recognizable by his leathers and motorcycle helmet, was bending over Tattletale, who was laid out on the conference table and breathing in a slow, regular rhythm. Unconscious, I hoped. Bitch was pacing back and forth in an endless cycle, occasionally directing a sharp head movement - a glare? - at whoever was nearest. I couldn't find her dogs - ah. Three dogs of hers were in an adjacent room, blocked off and hidden from her sight by a thick barrier of loose debris.

Regent was there, too. He lay on the floor of the room, not moving or breathing, his body growing cold. My breath caught in my throat. I, I...

...I shook myself and kept moving. I had seen hundreds of people dead or dying in my five minute motorcycle ride through downtown. I couldn't let one more slow me down. Besides, however much Regent had acted as if he was my friend, he had been completely fine with Coil's enslavement of Dinah.

I was shaken from my thoughts by a thick, wet sound behind me. The place it came from was hidden from my view by the curvature of the passage, but I sensed what was happening with my bugs. One of Noelle's mouths had spurted a fountain of warm, sticky liquid, from which rose a woman, tall and thin. She pulled herself to her feet and took off in a dead run to the exit. Noelle whipped out a tongue and caught the woman around the neck. She whispered something to the woman, then let her go.

As the woman neared the exit, I felt an abrupt wave of activity through my swarm as a fraction of my bugs moved in unison without my commands. Strange, many of the bugs were internal parasites that couldn't normally move on their own - ah. The bugs were being _carried_. All the small mammals in my range were moving as one. Mice, rats, squirrels, even a _bat_, all converging on the woman who was climbing out of the crater.

On the surface, Trickster turned his head toward the woman and she instantly disappeared. A second later the all of the mammals changed directions, moving to converge on a new point far outside of my range, probably more than a mile away.

What the hell? Noelle spit out a woman who attracted mammals?

"Noelle, who was that?" I said.

"Clone of you." she said. "You'll see-"

A mouth in the wall in front of me opened wide and gushed out a wave of chunky vomit and the upper half of a woman. She was naked, on her back, her head and torso in the passage while the rest was still inside the mouth. The woman groped out with her arms, found a grip on a piece of fallen debris, and began clambering out of the mouth.

I sent in my bugs in to get a sense of her shape in the dim lighting of the corridor...but the instant my bugs touched her they _froze_, refusing to heed my commands. I tried again, reaching out to the full extent of my swarm. Most of my bugs obediently moved toward me, but the bugs in a fifty foot zone around me had become unresponsive.

No, wait. Not a fifty foot zone around me. A zone centered on _her_. The woman wiped a stream of vomit out of her eyes and grinned at me with a grotesque, blister-pocked mockery of my own face.

_A clone of me_.

The woman, the other-me, let out a primal scream. A cry that mixed the raw emotions of relief and rage, triumph and malice.

And then my bugs turned on me. Swarming to cover my face, to get under my feet and throw off my footing, to crawl down the roots of my hair and bite at my scalp.

I let out a strangled scream and flailed at the bugs that were no longer my own. As fast as I pushed the bugs off my costume, mor came to replace them. I slipped on a mass of cockroaches that crawled underfoot and landed on my back. The woman's swarm was growing impossibly fast, doubling and then doubling again.

I realized that my power was drawing bugs to me from everywhere in my range. An instinctive response to attack, but in this case it was only bringing more insects into the woman's control range. I sent out a command to override it, and-

Noelle's deep, booming voice echoed through the corridor. "Stop it! Lay a finger on her and I'll kill you!"

The bugs around me froze in place.

"Get the bugs off her."

The bugs crawled off me and my vision cleared. The woman was still inside Noelle's mouth but she was writhing in place, in obvious pain. Noelle's mouth had bitten down on her hard, trapping her upper body in the corridor and her lower body inside the wall of flesh.

The other-me hissed in pain. She glared at me and spoke to Noelle in my own voice. "You can't trust her, Mom. That girl is an _abomination_. Hypocritical wannabe hero. Hates Emma for betraying her, but she stays up at night planning to betray _four_ of her friends, her _only_-"

Did she really just say-

"Shut up! You're the abomination." said Noelle.

The other-me cringed, "I, no, no, you can't _mean_ that, I-" She stopped herself, swallowed. "...sorry Mom. That arrogant little shit just pisses me off."

"I made you for fighting the Simurgh. The originals are off limits. Do your job or I'll kill you."

The other-me glowered at me for a moment. Then her expression shifted into a smirk. "Okay Mom. I'll be a good girl. Scout's honor."

I stared at the clone. The other-me apparently had my shape, my memories, even my power...and she hated my guts. I wonder what that said about me. Apparently the only thing that held the other-me back from killing me was a bizarre compulsion to treat Noelle as a family member, probably an effect of Noelle's power.

God. Parahumans could be so fucked up.

Noelle released the other-me. The woman crawled out of Noelle's mouth and crouched on the ground on all fours, looking up at me with a smirk. Then the bugs in the fifty foot zone around her converged on her body. I felt them crawl up her arms and legs, and...and crawl _into_ her skin as if it was made of putty. The bugs _dissolved_ into her flesh and her body began to change shape...

The other-me spoke to me with a venomous relish. As if she was getting grievances off her chest that had boiled inside her for years, that she could finally speak for the first time.

"_You._ Taylor. You took our mother away from us. _Murdered_ her. That eats at you, sits festering in your gut, and you'll have to live with it forever. But me? _I_ have a new Mom now." She ran a hand across one of Noelle's gargantuan mouths. "A thousand times more virtuous and beautiful than that stuck-up English professor."

Her skin was changing color - no, was being covered with a second skin, an exoskeleton. Small patches of jet black carapace appeared around each place where a bug was dissolved into her body. In a matter of seconds, her body was, with thicker concentrations of insects turning into heavier panels of armor around her head and chest. More than armor, her arms and legs were changing shape, fingers lengthening and sharpening into claws, and legs becoming heavily muscled and taking on an odd, curved shape.

"I'll be the good daughter you never were. Defend my Mom to the death. We'll do the _right_ thing and fight to kill an Endbringer. While you scurry away like a coward and keep up your unbroken record of failure at being a hero! Go ahead. Abandon your family and friends to save a kid you hardly know. You'll fail and get yourself killed like the loser wannabe you are!"

The other-me flexed her limbs and _leaped_ into the air above me, kicking my head as she passed above me and knocking me off balance. She made it to the exit in three more hops, far stronger and faster than a normal human. I felt her pass through my swarm, drawing insects to her as she went and absorbing them into her flesh. With the brief moments of contact as the insects were absorbed, I got the impression that her armor was getting stronger, thicker, growing wicked spines.

I stared after the clone. _So_ fucked up.

"Sorry. They're like that. Don't usually call me Mom." said Noelle. She didn't sound sorry. She sounded very, very tired.

"That's...that's fine. Okay." I said. It wasn't okay. It was horrible and wrong and sad.

The clone's words got to me. As if Emma had been transplanted into my body and given all of my memories as tools to bring me down. If I had been at school, and the clone-me had been an ordinary bully, I wouldn't have been able to handle it. Her abuse would have been an emotional assault that hit me in the gut.

But here and now...somehow, I could handle it. I wasn't Taylor Hebert, the bullied schoolgirl. I was Skitter, the powerful cape. I was on a mission to save Dinah Alcott, I was in the middle of a fucking Simurgh attack, and everyone's lives were on the line.

I couldn't let myself think about it any longer. _I was running out of time._

I made my way down the passage, drawing bugs to me to replace the ones the other-me took away. Twenty feet and I was past Noelle, and the massive, hammering impacts of her struggles resumed. Thirty more feet, clambering over collapsed sections of infrastructure, and I found my way to the conference room.

It was time to rejoin the Undersiders.


	5. Taylor 3

12:34 pm

I reached the last leg of the dark passage under Coil's base. I clambered over a fallen rack of soldier uniforms, a man-sized chunk of concrete that had been torn out of a wall, and half dozen bullet-ridden corpses that I recognized as Noelle's clones.

As I went I used my insects in the conference room ahead to get a better view of the Undersiders. I could only see blurry patches of light and dark through my insects, but I could get a general sense of their condition. The room had working electricity, apparently - the fluorescent lights in the ceiling were on. Coil soldiers sat on the floor, some of them still and stoic, others fiddling with their equipment. Each one of them had an assault rifles or grenade launcher at their side, and they had holstered sidearms with long, black-painted barrels. I had never seen them in action, but they were some sort of tinkertech lasers that could pierce through almost any material.

Thankfully, it seemed that Tattletale had only been knocked unconscious, not something more serious. She had woken up and was rubbing her forehead and talking with Grue. I moved my insects to form a message on the table next to her. "Coming, 1 sec"

Grue reacted immediately, rushing to the door and throwing it open. He stood tall in the doorway, his silhouette set off by the fluourescent lights of the room behind him, his body wreathed in coils of his darkness. More darkness than usual, more _alive_, for lack of a better word. A sign of the stress he was under.

"Skitter! You came. I didn't think-" He cut himself off, started again. "I thought you left the city. I'm...I'm glad you chose to stay with us, but you don't have to. You'd be safer-"

"No way. I couldn't leave you guys behind. You're my team. You're...you're my friends."

I swallowed. I felt guilty, lying to him like that. At some level, I still thought of him as a friend. But I couldn't let him know the truth. It wouldn't go well for me if he knew that I didn't consider myself an Undersider anymore, that I had only come back to save Dinah from his boss' clutches. I stepped forward to enter the room-

And Grue spread his arms wide and gave me a hug.

I froze, not knowing what to do. He hadn't ever hugged me before, not like this. Was he relieved that I stayed with the team? Or something more? I found him attractive. I had even kissed him once, though I had ulterior motives at the time. I had even fantasized about a scene very much like this. But...this scene was anything but romantic. Buried in the depths of a supervillain's ruined base, with the Simurgh's scream trilling in the back of my head.

Grue seemed to sense the awkwardness and let me go. He let his hands rest of my shoulders for a moment, then wordlessly turned and led me into the room.

Tattletale was stitting on the edge of the table. She gave me a lazy wave and returned to rubbing her forehead. Bitch gave me a glower and returned to her pacing. The last member of the team...I avoided looking the corner of the room where I knew he lay.

"I saw Regent." I said. " Or my bugs did. He's really...?"

Grue studied me for a moment, his expression unreadable behind his mask. "You saw the, uh, big girl up there-"

"Noelle. We met. That freaky cloning power."

"The Simurgh caved in the ceiling of her vault. Genesis fell in, and then her clone crawled into Noelle's body and hid inside while she sent her projection out to grab us and make more clones. She killed Regent and a lot of soldiers, almost had us until Noelle and Ballistic killed her. Regent..."

Grue paused. Searching for something positive to say about him? I didn't know how to feel about his death, either. Regent wasn't a model citizen by any stretch of the imagination, but...he had been a teammate, and sort of a friend. He had even offered to take revenge on my bullies, and however misguided his gesture was, I had the sense that it was genuine.

"He went down fighting." said Grue at last. "Tasered a clone in the face."

I nodded. Then, with a start, I realized what his account implied. "Noelle's clones. She can't control them? The one she made of me was pretty fucked up, but-"

Grue grabbed me by the shoulders. "We're going to have to fight clones of _you_? God _damn_ it, Skitter."

"Two clones." I said. Grue cursed. I continued. "Their powers were different, controlling rats and turning bugs into body armor. Noelle made them leave me alone and fight the Simurgh."

"It won't last." said Tattletale. She wasn't looking at us, her eyes still closed and rubbing her forehead. "Their 'homicidal' dial is stuck at maximum. Some of them follow Noelle's orders, more or less, but give them twenty minutes alone and they'll revert to their instincts. She's an S-class threat waiting to happen."

Well, damn. I resolved to put it to the back of my mind. We'd deal with that crisis later. I was getting off track.

"Coil's in a computer room near here, but I can't find Dinah." I paused, searched for a motive the Undersiders would accept. "We'll need Dinah for her precog. The Travellers said she can protect against the Simurgh. Did she, did she get killed too, or-"

Grue shook his head. "The girl got separated from the rest of us. Coil radioed his soldiers on the outside to take her off somewhere, I didn't hear where."

I breathed a sigh of relief. Dinah wasn't dead. There was a still chance to save her. I would go with plan A. Stay close to Coil and snatch her away when the time was right.

Tattletale caught my eye and raised a knowing eyebrow. She probably saw through my deception, but she wouldn't rat me out.

"I wouldn't trust Dinah to protect us." said Tattletale. "She didn't predict the Simurgh attack in the first place. Sure, the girl's precog is good, but the Simurgh is absolutely fucking _bullshit_."

"Damn. What about you? Does your power tell you what the Simurgh is planning, maybe give you countermeasures?"

Tattletale gave me an incredulous look. As if I was a toddler in a war zone politely asking mommy to put a stop to the bombing runs.

"I'm _trying_, but my power-agh!" Tattletale raised her hands and clutched at her head. "Fuck, she's getting closer. My power keeps getting stuck trying to figure out her song. It's giving me is a headache."

The chorus in my head wavered and split, turning into a pair of parallel screams, each one oscillating wildly between low and high notes. I winced. I had no idea what that meant but it couldn't be good.

"How much time do we-"

The base shook with an impact from Noelle's struggles, louder than before, followed by a low rumble. Coil moved in his room, and his voice came from a score of speakers scattered throughout the base.

"Miss Meinhardt will be opening an exit for us shortly. Captain Heroux, prepare to evacuate, contingency plan E. We will have ten to twenty minutes to escape the city before threshold exposure, depending on the Simurgh's movements."

"Yes, sir." said one of the soldiers, a tall, burly man with a scar on his chin. The leader, I assumed. Coil must have set up CCTVs throughout his base, using video feeds tough enough to withstand an Endbringer attack. The man was seriously dedicated to his surveillance.

"Skitter, thank you for your loyal assistance." Coil continued. "Be assured that you will be well rewarded. You and Tattletale will guide us to minimize the obstacles to our escape."

Another impact from Noelle, and the facility's foundations groaned. Through my bugs I felt the support beams that we trapping her twist under the strain. A final push and the beams snapped, sending her careening forward and demolishing the entrance room in front of her.

I couldn't touch Noelle with my bugs, but I could sense the consequences of her actions. A rapid series of impacts inside the entrance room and the ceiling collapsed, raining down more debris into the room. Then a swarm of my flyers abruptly died as Noelle leaped out of the crater and onto the ground above, landing with a terrific crash. The Travellers immediately made their escape, disappearing one by one as Trickster teleported them away.

"Miss Meinhardt is clear. Captain, your team will take point. Go now. Undersiders, I will join you momentarily and then we will bring up the rear."

The captain gave an order and the soldiers advanced, moving through the debris-strewn corridors with practiced skill.

Coil was moving in his sealed room. The few insects I had inside gave me a rough picture of his preparations. He put on a belt ringed with leather pouches and weapons, then strapped a heavy bag to his back. He was much stronger than I expected from his skeletal frame. He moved to exit his room, then stopped with his hand on the door.

Coil returned to his console and his voice rang out over the PA. "Stop! Fall back. Do not attempt to exit just yet."

The soldiers stopped short, backed away from the exit. I was already sensing the problem. The area where Noelle had punched a hole in the ceiling was unstable. My bugs on the surface were shifting in place as the ground shifted around them-

A great chunk of the ground fell into the hole, burying us once again.

"_Goddamn it_." shouted Grue. He was drowned out by a chorus of more vulgar curses from the soldiers.

"Do not despair." said Coil. "It's merely loose rubble and soil. Dig us out. The equipment is in closet 5D."

The captain pointed down the corridor, and three of the soldiers broke off and opened one of the closets on the wall. They returned with tools for excavation, shovels and buckets, and started digging. Why did Coil have this stuff? It was as if he had been preparing for a trench war, or had an interest in heavy-duty gardening.

Grue and I went to help the soldiers. I looked back to Bitch, expecting her to help, but she glared at me and returned to her pacing.

As we worked, I spoke up. "Coil. You asked me to guide our escape. How are we getting out of the city? A plane, or helicopters, or-"

"Plan E is four armored vans, with PRT markings and sirens to clear out the traffic."

"It won't work." I said. "The streets are jammed."

"Of course. A natural consequence of an attack on my base. That is why the vans are kept in a secure garage two blocks West of here-"

"No. The streets _everywhere_ are jammed, blocked off by car crashes. Your sirens won't do us any good."

There was a pause. "Damnation. The Travellers? Trickster?"

"The Travellers left with Noelle. No sign of them above ground. Noelle said she was going to try to kill the Simurgh, and I got the impression Trickster was going to help her."

A longer pause. "Very disappointing. I suppose he won't be coming back."

I reached out to my bugs, searched for anything we could use to get out in time. I searched the base, the underground sewers around us, the city streets and crumbling buildings above. The picture my bugs painted was a nightmare. _Crashed cars, people dead and dying in the streets._ I tried to keep my emotions under control, to focus on utility, but it wasn't easy. _A father holding the lifeless body of a child. A bird trapped in her cage in an abandoned office-_

An idea came to mind. A way to get us out of the city and accomplish my other goal as well, in the same stroke.

I turned to Bitch, still pacing back and forth. "Your dogs can get us out of the city, right? They're fast when you-"

Bitch whirled to face me and _snarled_. "The snake motherfucker took my dogs away. Brutus, Judas, Angelica. Can't find them anywhere."

"Your dogs were well taken care of, Bitch." said Coil, a hint of irritation in his voice. "The collapse was an unfortunate circmustance none of us could have predicted."

"I'll give you an unfortunate fucking-"

"I found your dogs." I said.

Bitch's jaw dropped. The corners of her mouth slowly rose into a smile, until she forcibly clamped it down. "You'd better not be fucking with me."

"Your dogs are fine. As far as I can tell with my bugs. We can dig them out in a minute."

"Excellent work, Skitter." said Coil. "Direct my soldiers to the dogs."

"Where's Dinah?" I said.

Ten seconds of silence on the PA. The Undersiders stared at me, and the captain of the soldiers regarded me with a stern look. I tried to stand straight, forced myself to meet their gazes. My mask and lenses made it easier, let me detatch myself from the pressure of their eyes.

Coil finally spoke. "I ordered my men to move Miss Alcott to a safe house. She's most likely alive and well."

"Where?"

"We're under a strict time limit at the moment. Rest assured, Skitter, I'll tell you all the details when we're free."

I raised my voice. "Tell me where Dinah is, promise to let her go, and I'll tell you where the dogs are."

Bitch growled at me, a deep sound from her throat. "I said you'd better not be fucking with me! Give me back my dogs!"

One month ago, before I became a cape, I would have cowered before her rage. Now I stood up to her without a tremor. I had done it when I joined the team. I would do it again now.

"You'll get your dogs back." I said. "Coil is a reasonable man. He knows Dinah isn't worth a dove tattoo."

The soldiers in the room kept digging but shifted their posture. Their weapons closer to hand, ready for a fight.

"Fuck you! You're taking my dogs hostage!" said Bitch. She took two steps toward me and balled her hands into fists.

Grue stopped digging and stood behind Bitch, hands out to his sides. Ready to restrain Bitch or cast darkness over the soldiers, whichever was needed for the situation. He spoke, somehow managing to project a sense of calm. The only sign of his stress was the wreath of writhing darkness around his body.

"Skitter, we don't have time to negotiate. We can discuss this after, as a team."

"No. I helped him kidnap Dinah. Now I'm going to set her free."

"Look, you want to help Dinah, fine. You can't help her unless you survive. And we won't survive an Endbringer if we're at each others' throats. Right now we need to work together," he turned his head to the soldiers, "_all_ of us," he turned back to me, "to make it out of here."

Damn him. He was absolutely correct. Pragmatic and reasonable as always. And the same way of thinking that had led me to the fucked up place I was today. A vision swam before my eyes, so vivid it felt almost real.

* * *

"We hit on a Thursday just after noon, and it should be the best day and time for the sheer size of the take. Only way we're getting away with less than thirty thousand is if we fuck up. With what the boss is offering, that's ninety thou."

Tattletale folded her arms.

Brian sighed, long and loud, "Well, you got me, I guess. It sounds good."

Lisa turned to Alec. There wasn't any resistance to be found there. He just said, "Fuck yeah, I'm in."

Bitch didn't need convincing any more than Alec had. She nodded once and then turned her attention to the scarred little dog.

Then everyone looked at me.

"What would I be doing?" I asked, nervously, hoping to stall or find holes in the plan that I could use to argue against it.

So Lisa outlined a general plan. Brian made suggestions, good ones, and the plan was adjusted accordingly. I realized with a growing disappointment and a knot of anxiety in my gut that it was almost inevitably going to happen.

Arguing against the bank robbery at this point would hurt my undercover operation more than it helped anyone. With that in mind, I began offering suggestions that - I hoped - would minimize the possibility of disaster. The way I saw it, if I helped things go smoothly, it would help my scheme to get info on the Undersiders and their boss. It would minimize the chance that someone would panic or be reckless and get a civilian hurt. I thought I would feel worse if that happened than I would about going to jail.

* * *

I blinked, shook my head to clear my vision. It wasn't just the sights and sounds I remembered. It was the stab of guilt in my gut for how stupid and naive I had been. I had patted myself on the back for looking out for the health of civilians, while every action I took was in the service of stealing a twelve year old girl from her family and enslaving her to a drug lord.

"Skitter?" said Grue.

Grue's plan was the rational way to go. Cooperation and teamwork was our best chance to survive. But today I wasn't feeling particularly _rational_. I was tired of being a villain, tired of dressing it up my crimes with rationalization after rationalization.

I was going to do the right thing for once, even if it killed me.

"No! No compromises." I looked at the ceiling, where I imagined Coil's CCTV cameras were. "You want my cooperation, Coil? This is the cost. _Everyone_ goes free, or no one does."

A rumble in the distance, like a clap of thunder. Then the rumble repeated, ten times in quick succession. As if in response, the Simurgh's scream in my head intensified, splitting from two parallel songs into three.

Tattletale winced. "Endbringer's coming this way."

Coil's voice was calm and smooth as glass. "I see. Captain Heroux. If Skitter makes a move or uses her bugs, shoot her. With the laser attachments. Tattletale. Where are the dogs?"

_Damn_ him.

The captain and two of his soldiers drew their rifles and aimed them at me. I tried to project confidence, to stand tall and meet their gazes evenly, but I had no idea if I managed it. I doubted my armor would stop the lasers. I clamped down on the bugs in their line of sight, froze them in place, while gathering a swarm out of their view. Bugs in the wall behind them, the ceiling, the floor, all ready to burst out through the cracks and take them down as fast as possible.

In the edge of my vision I saw Tattletale. She was studying my face, her expression torn.

Grue spoke quickly. "Wait a minute, Coil. Skitter's not talking rationally, but we're all under a lot of pressure here. We're not going to let you kill her for-"

"Captain Heroux. The same treatment for Grue and his darkness." The captian gestured, and two more soldiers stopped digging and pointed their rifles at Grue.

"Coil, wait-"

"I bear you no ill will, Grue, but now is not the time. Miss Alcott is our best protection against the Simurgh's plots. We can't afford to lose her. Tattletale? The dogs?"

Tattletale pursed her lips. "I have to say, boss, I see where she's coming from. Using us to kidnap a little girl who you keep drugged up in your office? Yeah. I'm not a big believer in good versus evil, but that's still pretty shitty in my books."

"I'm a villain. When you agreed to work for me, you were never promised a life of doing charity work with orphans!" Coil raised his voice as he spoke, the first time I had seen him lose his composure. "First the Travellers and now you Undersiders. Have you all gone insane? Don't you hear the Simurgh screaming into your brain? We're running out of time! Where are the dogs, Tattletale?"

Tattletale closed her eyes, raised a hand and rubbed at her forehead. She shuddered, squeezed her eyes shut, shook her head as though to clear it. Then she lowered her hand, and she was wearing her trademark grin. The first time I had seen her grin today. And she _laughed_.

"You know what, Coil? Fuck you. I had a life of my own. I had plans. Then you made me work for you at gunpoint. Fine, rule of the jungle and all that. I roll with it, I learn to deal, everything's copacetic. I survive.

"And you, right now? Your delicately laid plains are getting busted up by a girl holding an _Endbringer_-sized gun to your head, and you're going into _hysterics_, and I'm laughing my ass off over here. Welcome to the real world, boss man. Learn to fucking cope."

There was a long pause, with only the Simurgh's scream to break the silence.

"Very well." said Coil, composed once more. "I ordered my men to bring Miss Alcott to the safe house at 534 Harlow Drive, in the suburbs south of the city. The verbal password is 'Better to rule in Heaven'. The keypad code is 8535. Now, Skitter. Where are the dogs?"

"You'll let her go, and all of us too. You won't come after us." I said.

"And your soldiers give us a few of their fancy lasers. So we can off them the instant my power gives me a _hint_ that you're going to have them shoot us in the back." said Tattletale.

"_Yes_. I give you my word. You'll have your pound of flesh. Men, put down your weapons." said Coil.

"Tattle, is he-"

"He's telling the truth." she said with a grin. "Never thought I'd see someone get him by the balls."

I felt a wave of satisfaction. _I did it_.

"Follow me, Bitch." I said. "Let's go get your dogs."

...

(Author's note: the vision is from Worm, Agitation 3.3)


	6. Taylor 4

12:42 pm

"The dogs are buried here." I said. "Get this rubble out of the way, go in the door, go down to the room below through the hole in the floor, then you're there."

The three soldiers we had brought with us got to work, using shovels to move away crumbled fragments of concrete and working together to hoist away the larger chunks of debris. Bitch managed to do as much work as any of them, digging with frantic haste with her bare hands. It took less than a minute to uncover the metal door, then another ten seconds for the soldiers to melt through the jammed lock with their bright purple laser beams.

A solider kicked down the door and Bitch ran inside, putting her fingers in her mouth and letting out a deafening whistle. There was a chorus of answering barks. Her dogs leaped up from the floor below. They were already under the influence of her power, grown four feet tall with bony, prehensile tails. Bitch hugged them one by one, then began stroking their flanks and muttering to them in loving tones.

I considered asking Bitch if we were still on good terms, now that she got her dogs back, but thought better of it. Better to let her have her private moment. Besides, even though I found her dogs for her, I doubted she would forgive me for using them as hostages to twist Coil's arm. She hadn't spoken to me once since the incident, only acknowledging me with a growl.

I joined the soldiers and jogged back to the exit to help us dig out. When I arrived I saw that our way out was already taking shape, soil and ruble pushed aside strategically to clear a path with the least amount of space.

"How much longer?" I asked Tattetale.

"Five minutes tops. Heroux here knows how to dig a trench." she said. "If we take Bitch's dogs, take a straight path to the safehouse and out of the city, we'll make it with a few minutes to spare. The Simurgh got quiet all of a sudden, I think she's all the way over at the ship graveyard, so we have some breathing room."

She was right. The Simurgh's scream in my head was as faint as it had been at the start of the attack, when I had been a mile and a half away from the Endbringer at the motel.

I smiled, for the first time since I made it to the base. _We could do it._ Save Dinah, save the Undersiders, escape the city with our minds intact.

In the sealed computer room, Coil shot up in his seat. "What? _What?_"

I couldn't tell what Coil had noticed, but he cast about as though he was disoriented. Looking for something that wasn't there. He moved to the console and his voice rang out.

"Someone is interfering with my power. Tattletale, Skitter, search for the source and tell me _immediately_ of any potential-"

One of the tall, sealed closets of his room opened and a man strode out. Tall, skeletally thin, in an all-concealing costume and carrying a gun in his hands. _Another Coil. A clone._

The clone pressed a button on the wall and the PA cut out. Coil whirled to face him but the clone already had his gun raised. There were two bright flashes of light.

Coil fell backwards and slumped to the floor. My bugs felt a pool of warm liquid spreading beneath him. _Gunshot wounds to the head._

The clone approached the console, set his gun down and typed on the keyboard. A new voice rang out. Identical to Coil's but with an unhealthy rasp, as though he had spent a lifetime smoking cigarettes.

"Undersiders, soldiers, you have new orders. You are to-"

"Don't listen!" I shouted. "It's a clone, he just killed Coil."

A soft laugh over the speakers. "You noticed. A shame. I assure you, however, that you will all be _very_ interested in what I have to say."

Tattletale's eyes widened. She whispered under her breath. "Fucking bird bitch. _Absolutely fucking bullshit._"

The captain shouted an order to cut off a chorus of curses from the soldiers. "Keep digging!"

I gathered my insects in the computer room to prepare an attack, but I barely had anything to work with. A large number of ants, a handful of cockroaches and other crawlers, three spiders, three mosquitoes, fourteen flies. I couldn't add new bugs to my forces, either. Coil had hermetically sealed the entrance behind him. The room must have been intended to double as panic room.

"Tattle, what's Coil's power? How do we beat him?" said Grue.

The clone chuckled. "You can't beat me. You've already lost. You don't know it yet, but you're nothing more than figments of my dream."

Grue created a hollow sphere of darkness around us, giving us a moment of privacy. "Tattletale, you know the man. Spill it!"

Tattletale shook her head. "Don't think it'll make a difference." she said. Her voice was nearly a whisper. I had never seen her like this. She was _trembling_. What the hell was his power?

"Do _something_!" hissed Grue, then dismissed his darkness in time for us to hear the clone's next words.

"Oh, you needn't worry. I'll enjoy filling you in." said the clone. "My power is to live in two worlds, like waking dreams, and to choose which world becomes reality. You know very well what I did in _this_ world. I waited here in the closet until Coil let slip the Master-Stranger passwords that he put in place after he suspected he was cloned. 'Better to rule in Heaven' and '8535'. Then I shot the worthless man to death. And right now I'm gloating about it to all of you. My dear employees."

The clone leaned forward on the desk. "And _now_ I have my hands on the keyboard to enter the self-destruct code that will turn this base into a half-kiloton fireball. I'll wait for my Tattletale to confirm that I'm telling the truth..."

Tattletale went pale. "Shit."

"There we go. In a few minutes I'm going to type in the code and watch your faces as you're consumed by fire. Then I will discard this world and turn the _other_ world into reality. There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop me. Shooting, stabbing, killing...it's all useless against me. I'll simply consign you to nonexistence a few moments sooner.

"However, I will give you a final gift before we say goodbye. A gift to Skitter and Tattletale especially, a reward for their enviable loyalty." He paused, drawing out the moment. "Would you like to know what I'm doing in that other world, the world that will soon become reality?"

I..._really_ didn't like the implications of that power.

"Tattletale. Tell me he's full of shit." said Grue.

Tattletale hugged her arms against her chest. She shook her head, her mouth a thin line.

The clone chuckled. "Very well. In the other world, I escaped my base with a spare costume and sent the self-destruct signal remotely, sending you all to your firey deaths." He paused and rubbed his chin. "Except Miss Meinhardt, of course. She's too resilient to be bothered by such trifles. If anything, I assisted in her escape." He cracked his knuckles. "After that I tailed Coil's soldiers as they escorted my dear pet to her safe house at the edge of town. Then I waited across the street until I heard the Coil of _this_ world let slip the passwords.

"You see where I am going with this, I trust? It's now a simple matter for me to gain entrance to the safe house, have my way with my employees, collect my pet, and ride off into the sunset."

The clone shifted in place, contemplated Coil's body. "Pathetic, really. The man understood the pleasures of the flesh but he was too much of a coward to indulge them in reality. What a Puritan. Why bother to use drugs to earn a child's compliance when there are other, far more enjoyable means at your disposal? Or why not simply use both?"

He clucked his tongue. "Well, I'll have time enough to rectify that. I know you're envious that you can't see into my parallel worlds, Tattletale, so I'll indulge your curiosity and tell you just this once.

"I'm now walking up the front steps to the safe house. Captain Sulewski is there. He's asking me for the verbal code...yes, very good. What a nice salute you have, Captain Sulewski. He's asking me to enter the numerical code into the keypad on the door...unlocked. Perfect. The others are in the living room. They've been keeping my pet nice and snug, tied to a chair."

I tried to block out his words. Concentrated on helping the soldiers dig.

The clone chuckled. "Oh my. Isn't that cute? My dear pet has been trying to use her power to escape her fate. She told the soldiers that I'm going to murder them with eighty seven percent probability. I wonder where the other thirteen percent comes from? Hmm, I suppose I could decide to merely torture them. No matter. My employees don't believe her. They put their trust in their reliable, kind-hearted employer.

"I order my men to line up on the patio. Ah, what a pleasant backdrop in the distance. Miss Meinhardt leading the fight against Simurgh. Majestic. There won't be much of Brockton Bay left when they're done. I take out my pistol, turn on the laser attachment, and...ahahaha, there's not much of _you_ left either, Captain Sulewski!"

"Minor! You fucking bastard!" cried out of the soldiers, a woman.

"Keep digging, hurry!" said the captain.

The clone ignored them and kept up his narration. "Mister Pitter and Miss Feingold are next. Ah...they don't put up much of a fight. I leave Mister Pitter alive, sans his arms and legs. The laser cauterizes the wounds so he'll survive for another few hours at least. Enjoy your fun in the sun, Mister Pitter! Now, to collect my dear pet..."

I felt myself tearing up. I had been so close. So close to saving Dinah, and now, now he was going to make me _listen_ to him while he...

"Oh my! My pet is so lovely like this. I'm a generous master, my dear. You have my permission to sniffle and sob your heart's content. I get out the tools to temporarily take away her voice. Can't have her pulling tricks with the border guards. My poor daughter, hit in the throat by a piece of falling debris."

The words tore from my throat, almost without my conscious approval. "Stop it! Stop! Don't hurt her! I'll...I'll-"

The clone laughed. "There is nothing you can offer me, dear Skitter. Ah, but before I take my pet's voice away, I suppose I can allow her to give one last hurrah. For the listening pleasure of our audience at home. Tell me, pet. What's the chance we escape the city alive?" He paused. "Hmm. One point three five? And why is that-..._What?_"

The clone stared at his hands, clenched and unclenched his fists. "_Why?_ Why did I die? What the hell was that?"

I gasped. My bugs sensed it before he did.

Coil's right arm, slick with blood, slowly rose and pointed a pistol at the clone's head.

The clone practically jumped out of his skin, leaped away from the keyboard and hid behind one of the server racks. "You're alive..._damnation_."

Coil spoke slowly, words coming out in pained bursts. "Double-tap is pointless...if you shoot the same spot...Impulsive fool."

"How did you kill me? You were dead. I blew you up!"

"Never briefed Sulewski...on the blue suitcases."

"The timed explosives. You...you ordered Sulewski to plug a blue suitcase into the keypad. So entering the wrong code alerts the soldiers, while entering the _correct_ code blows everyone up unless you have a second code to shut down the suitcase-"

"Told you you're impulsive...should've noticed the extra wire...plenty of time to defuse."

"You paranoid nutcase!" screamed the clone. "This is why you never get any joy out of life! Would it kill you to fucking live a little?"

"Yes." said Coil. Behind the pain, I could hear a smile in his voice. "Think I'd...take chances with...clones of _me_ running around?"

"You're still going to lose. We're both trapped in this room but my power is stronger. I can force your other selves into my other worlds. You can't escape."

"Shoot you...before you destruct...in every world." Coil was limp and slumped on the floor, only exerting himself to lift his gun arm at his side, but his aim was utterly still.

"You'll die of blood loss in a minute. I can wait."

_Fuck._ I gathered my meager swarm in the room, prepared to do as much damage as I could. To have any effect at all I would need the element of surprise.

I slowly moved my spiders and crawlers behind the clone, keeping them behind the racks of equipment, out of the clone's sight. I did the same with my flies and mosquitoes, moving them one by one at irregular intervals to avoid drawing the clone's attention. All I had left to track Coil and the clone were a scattering on ants on their bodies.

Grue shouted. "Bitch, break down the door! Hurry!"

"Will the smug bastards stop talking if I do that?" said Bitch.

"Yes." said Tattletale.

Bitch nodded. "Where do I go?"

I grabbed Bitch by the arm and led her to the corridor. She whistled and her dogs followed suit. Their skin was already splitting apart, their bodies growing new bone and muscle under the influence of her power.

The clone speaking to Coil with an exasperated tone. "Why are you fighting me? Why save your 'employees'? Take them out with you, go out with a bang. Revenge for how they put a gun to your head."

"No." Coil's voice was quiet, weaker than before. My ants on his right foot began moving in fits and starts. His foot was twitching spasmodically, nerves misfiring.

"You don't care about them. They're just playing pieces. When you're done with a game, you put the pieces back in the box. Let me type in the code."

"No." Coil's neck spasmed. His head drooped down to stare at his twitching foot.

We reached the door. I pointed, and Bitch gave another whistle, loud and shrill. Her dogs leaped forward and banged at the door, making dents and scratches with every hit, but she couldn't grow them to even a fraction of their full size in the cramped corridor. Grue and two of the soldiers followed behind, firing lasers at the joints of the door. The lasers heated the metal white hot but didn't pierce through. One of the soldiers swore. "Who the hell laser-proofs their server room?"

My insects were in position, for all the good it would do. Crawlers on the ceiling ready to drop on the clone, flyers on either side to get in his face and block his sight and buzz in his ears. Coil must have seen them but he didn't let out a sign to give it away.

"You've already lost." said the clone. "It only takes me eight seconds to leave my cover and type in the code. You need to kill me instantly to stop me. And your aim is getting worse by the second. In the last other world you didn't even manage to hit anything vital...See? There, you just hit my shoulder. Let's try again. _There_, you just hit my arm." The clone chuckled. "I've already won, and I'm simply optimizing the outcome. I'm going to keep going until I type in the code without a single scratch on me. See your face when you know you're completely beaten."

One of Bitch's dogs slammed into the door, making the metal buckle by an inch. Another slam and the dent became bigger. Not fast enough.

Coil shuddered. His head was still lolling, staring at his foot. ...wait. There was a pattern in the way his foot was moving. He was sending a message. Six twitches, then five, then four...

Coil cleared his throat. "This city will be mine..."

Twitch, twitch, twitch. _Three_

"...or the city will be another's..."

Twitch, twitch. _Two_

"...but it will _never_ be yours."

Twitch. _One_

I sent in my bugs. The clone flinched at the flyers in his eyes, the spiders on his face, the buzzing in his ears, and he stumbled out from behind the server rack into Coil's line of sight-

A single flare of light, the muffled sound of a gunshot.

The clone slumped to the floor, a bullet wound in the center of his forehead.

I let out a sigh. "The clone's dead. You can stop-"

Another muffled gunshot, then another, then another, Coil keeping up his barrage until he ran out of ammunition.

"...Okay, _now_ the clone's dead. You can call off the dogs."

Bitch frowned. "What about the other one?"

"The real Coil? Coil's dying."

Her frown depened. "So I didn't get to make either of them stop talking."

"He's not going to be talking much longer." said Tattletale.

Coil's voice came through the PA system. "My thanks, Skitter...code to disarm the suitcase...aleph-aleph-washington-vikare...take care of Miss Alcott...use her well."

I clenched my fists. "I'm not going to _use_ her."

"They say the...most sublime pleasure...is overcoming one's demons...I quite agree." A pause. "What a pleasant...dream."

Coil's voice faded out.

Tattletale brushed past me, walked up to the room and put her hand on the door. She bowed her head and spoke in solemn tones.

"R.I.P. Coil. The manipulative bastard we all wished we could be. I wanted you dead and it took two S-class threats to do the job. If there's another clone of you out there, may God have mercy on our souls."

Tattletale spun around to face us and clapped her hands, a grin on her face. "Welp, we're done here. The bird bitch is on the other side of town, so if we're lucky we've got, oh, six to ten minutes to get out of dodge. Chop chop."

We ran for the exit.

The timing was perfect. The soldiers at the exit had just finished the tunnel. My bugs sensed the first soldiers crawl through and climb to the surface.

On the other side of the construction site, my bugs sensed an odd movement in the air. It seemed that the collapse when Noelle had left the base had shifted a PA speaker to the surface. Coil's last words had been spoken into the open air.

And now, from a point next to the speaker, three small warm bodies launched themselves into the air. They flew away from the base in a 'V' formation, a chorus of high-frequency sounds trailing in their wake, in the direction of the safe house to the south.

Bats?


	7. Victoria 3

12:49 pm

Victoria watched as Amy touched their mother's mangled hand and got to work. Brandish immediately sagged to the ground, and let out a deep sigh. Relief from her pain.

It should have been a moment of celebration. Finding out that Mom was alive, knowing that they would save her and escape the Endbringer with their minds and bodies intact. But Victoria found herself shifting in place restlessly, tension humming through her body like a live wire. Her eyes flicked between her sister, her mother, the battle with the Simurgh that was destroying Downtown, the streets leading to the north where the military blockade was forming a half-mile away-

_There's no time left. Four minutes at most._

Victoria squeezed her eyes shut, clenched and unclenched her hands. It was hard to keep her focus with the Simurgh's hellish cacophany in her head.

"What the hell happened to you, Mom? I've never seen anything like this." said Amy.

"It's a nightmare out there." said Brandish. "There's a Case-53 who mutates everyone around her. The Simurgh drove her crazy and set her loose on us. She's a monster regenerator, won't stay down, and-"

Brandish winced. The tumors on her face were healing under the influence of Amy's power, one by one. The smaller growths were reabsorbing into her body, while the larger tumors wriggled and then dropped off her face like worms.

"-and she touched me and the next thing I knew I was halfway across the city, like _this_."

"Hold still." said Amy. "I'll finish healing the worst of it but we have to leave-"

"No! We have to go back. The monster got the others. Mark, Sarah, your cousins."

Victoria's heart skipped a beat. Her family's faces rose to the front of her mind. Dad. Aunt Sarah and Uncle Neil. Her cousins, Eric and Crystal. In her desperation she had put them out of her mind, cast everything aside but her single-minded drive to get out of the city with Amy. Now they

And then the faces changed. Twisted like Mom's, bubbling with sores and blood. She imagined Dad, leaning against the wall in an alley, slumping to the ground and too weak to pull himself to his feet, countless capes passing by and ignoring him in their haste to escape the Endbringer. Spending the last hour of his life slowly dying in the mangled wreck of his body, with only the Simurgh's song as company.

"Oh God. Fuck, fuck, _fucking_ Simurgh." Victoria clenched her fists and looked Downtown, in time to see the top of a skyscraper rip apart into pieces. In the next instant the pieces became a barrage of high-speed projectiles, hitting their targets on the ground with an earthshaking crash.

Victoria's mouth had gone dry. She licked her lips. "Okay. Okay. Shit. Okay. Where's Dad? I can go a mile a minute, but-"

The Simurgh's song in her head hit a crescendo, and a memory swam before her eyes-

* * *

Victoria gazed into Amy's eyes, searching for some sign she could use to understand her. "Amy, I _know_ what I want. I want to be with you."

"I want it too. It's just...you have to understand, Vicky. You only know how to live in the moment. I love that about you, it's how you make life a joy for everyone around you, but that means it's up to _me_ to think about our future. We're still young, and people change. We don't know if we'll feel the same way when we're twenty, thirty, forty years old. Can you honestly say our relationship is anywhere near that stage?"

"Yes! I absolutely can. I want to be with you, till death do us part."

Amy chewed at her lip. "You haven't even tried going out with boys. I know you like them. What if, what if it turns out you like boys more than girls. It wouldn't be right for me to take you for myself now, when we're still young, and deny you a chance to find greater happiness."

Victoria laughed, a hint of bitterness tinging her voice. "Are you listening to yourself Amy? That's insane. By your logic no one should ever start a relationship because there might be someone else, somewhere in the world, who might possibly be better." She took Amy's hands into her own, felt the warmth of her palms. "You can't calculate the probability of love. Love isn't a matter of chance. You have to trust your feelings and follow your heart."

"I...I do trust my feelings. Mostly. It's not about that, it's about the future they'll become. I want us to go ahead at a normal pace, grow into our relationship a little more before we make anything official. And...and if we go forward with it now the paparazzi will find out about it and they'll kick up a fuss. Not just for us, but for our family, our team. People already look down on it, the kind of relationship we'd have if we took it any further, and if-"

"No. Nope. I'm stopping you right there. The paparazzi? The six o'clock news? The man on the street? They may as well live on the moon for all I care. Whatever bullshit they think doesn't matter at all. They're nothing. They have no right." Victoria gently squeezed her hands, fixed her with her gaze. "I love you. And you love me. That's the only thing that matters."

Amy returned her gaze for a long minute. She spoke quietly. "I do love you. I want to enjoy that love, give it the care and attention it deserves, make sure it's right for us and build it into a proper relationship in its due time. I can't make myself go as fast as you want. Not now. If...if you hate me for this, I'll understand."

"Oh, Ames." Victoria sighed. "Don't say that. I could never hate you. You're stubborn as hell, you get yourself twisted up about the most frustrating things, but that's who you are. I can't praise you for sticking to your guns in the clinic and then snap at you when you do it here. I know you only want what's best for us."

"Thank you. I'm glad."

"But." said Victoria. Amy wrinkled her brow, and Victoria smiled.

"That doesn't mean I can't make vows of my own. So listen, Amy. I promise. Whatever you need me for, I'll be there for you. If you're ever in danger, I'll fly to your side and protect you. No matter what happens between us. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part."

* * *

Victoria's gaze landed on her sister, and her voice caught in her throat. Amy's face was pale, one hand gripping Mom's and the other raised to her mouth. A reflex, an impulse to bite at her fingers when she was nervous. A bad habit she'd outgrown years ago when she was a child, now brought back as the Simurgh attack wore on her mind.

Amy wasn't a fighter. She was _fragile_. A single stray shot from a cape would end her life in a heartbeat. She was the greatest hero of them all. The one whose healing had saved _thousands_ of lives, with the heart of a saint to match. And she was the one Victoria loved most of all.

No. She couldn't possibly take Amy back into that mess, to face the Simurgh again. If any one of them was going to get out of this alive, she would make sure it was her sister.

"...I'm not fast enough to save everyone. We don't have _time_." Her voice came out in a croak. She squeezed her eyes shut, felt a tear roll down her cheek. "We, we have to trust Dad and Aunt Sarah. They'll make it. Mom, I'll give you a lift-"

Brandish fixed her with a stern glare. "I said _no_, Victoria! We are not abandoning my husband!"

"We can't bring Amy to fight an Endbringer! I'll...I'll get you two out, then I'll go back for Dad and-"

"Leave her! Amy can evacuate on her own. Go save your _family_, Victoria Lee Dallon."

Victoria gritted her teeth. How could Mom say that? It was horrible, but-

* * *

"No way, I want to go! Sis helped make the set for the play, the big pirate ship. I want to see it!"

"Vicky, sweetie, Daddy is in the hospital today, remember?" said Carol. "You know how Daddy gets sometimes. He doesn't feel well, and he has to visit the hospital so they can keep an eye on him. We have to visit him too, to keep his spirits up."

"Yeah...in the _psych ward_." said Victoria, a touch of resentment in her voice.

"Don't say it like that. Not in public. You know that kids are cruel and tabloids are worse. They'll never let us live it down."

"I know." said Victoria, with an exaggerated sigh. "I still want to go. _You_ go visit Daddy and _I'll_ go to the play."

"Daddy needs the both of us to cheer him up. He loves you more than anything else in the world, you know. You can help me make him smile, okay, sweetie? Besides, I can't leave you alone at school on a Friday night-"

"Then why are you leaving sis alone at school? I'm not leaving her. I _promised_ her I'd come and see the Pirates of Penzance! And we'll sit next to each other in the front row, and-"

"Victoria, that's enough. It's her play so she can stay. Amy will be perfectly fine. The theatre teacher will be right there and our family gets special treatment from school security. Now come here."

"No. You're being mean to sis. I promised, and I won't let you make me break my promise, and you're supposed to come to the play too, like you said you would, and-"

"Don't take that tone with me. And stop 'defending' Amy as you're so fond of. It's tiresome. She's not under attack. I'm being perfectly fair. _Come here._ We're going."

"No! If you really loved sis and me you'd let us see the play together!"

"_Victoria-_"

* * *

-but in a sick way, it was what she had always known her mother would say when the stakes were life and death. Mom had always loved Victoria first and her adopted daughter second. It had always been Victoria's job to stick up for her sister.

Victoria's aura thrummed beneath her skin. "I am _not_ letting you leave my sister to die in this hellhole! She saved me. She saved _you_. I promised to protect her until the end of my days, and like hell are you going to leave her to an Endbringer's mercy!"

Brandish's eyes went wide, momentarily staggered by the force of Victoria's emotion and her aura. Then her face twisted into a look of pure loathing, the emotion almost alien in its intensity. Victoria had only seen her like this once before, when she had hunted down the villain behind a child prostitution ring.

Brandish spoke with venom in her voice. "_Amelia_ knew the risks when she chose to call herself a hero. I can't believe you're doing this to us. You're a traitor to your family."

_A traitor to your family._ The words echoed in her skull, sank into her gut like a knife. "Mom, no, y-you can't mean that-"

"I damn well can! If you leave my husband and sister to die here, Victoria, I swear to God I'll _disown_ you, and that's the least of-"

"Stop it! Both of you, stop fighting!" Amy cried out to make herself heard. "Mom, there's something wrong with your brain. Stress hormone cascade, aggression, repulsion, it's almost like-" Amy glanced at Victoria. "I've seen something like this before. Hold still, I'll heal you. I can fix it, or slow it down-"

"Hands off!" Brandish threw off Amy's hand and shoved her to the ground.

"Mom, no! She's trying to help!" Victoria flew to her sister's side, lifted her to her feet, and put herself between her sister and her mother.

"So you're doing brains now, Amy?" Brandish's voice dripped with scorn. "You broke your rule. I'm disappointed in you."

"I had to! I had to to save Vicky!" Amy tugged at Victoria's arm. "She's not thinking straight. We need to-"

"Don't you dare touch me." hissed Brandish. "I always thought you'd live up to your father's example. Marquis was scum but he kept his promises. He never killed a woman, not even when we outnumbered him six to one. He went to the Birdcage for his principles."

_Marquis_. Victoria heard Amy gasp at her side, felt her own head whirl. Marquis was one of the sick bastards that Mom and her family took down back in the day. Cop-killer, hero-killer. Killed his own men if they didn't meet his standards. A bio-manipulator of bone, strong enough to fight entire teams of capes and walk away unharmed.

It all fit. The year of the arrest, the bio-manipulation, the absolute refusal to say anything about her biological parents.

Brandish took a step forward. "But his little girl _Amelia_ is scum who _breaks_ her promises. You let hundreds of innocents die for your stupid rule, and then you broke it at the first chance you got to diddle my daughter's brains. That's not your _bad blood_. That's your own personal, sick excuse for morality."

Amy slumped to her knees, a slow-motion collapse. She whispered under her breath, a single phrase repeated over and over. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry-"

Victoria's gut twisted at the sight of her sister's pain. She faced Brandish and cranked her aura up another notch, tried to speak with a tone of confidence and command that she didn't feel.

"That's enough! This isn't you, Mom. You'd never say that, not in a million years! You're, you're letting the Simurgh get to you. You can fight it, you're better than this. So just, just shut the hell up and stand still and let Amy heal you!"

Brandish ignored her words, fixed her gaze on Amy. "Amelia. What did you do to my daughter? Take away her love for me and steal it for yourself? The same thing you've been doing ever since you forced yourself on my family ten years ago! Parasite!"

A flicker of light and Brandish disappeared, replaced by a spark of yellow light hovering at waist level, surrounded by layers of spherical forcefields that rendered it invulnerable. Her breaker state, her energy form.

Then the spark _moved-_

It was only by pure reflex that Victoria intercepted the spark. It moved in a blur toward Amy's face and Victoria barely managed to put her hand in front of it before impact. The spark struck Victoria's fingers and _detonated_, giving off a brilliant flare of light. It rebounded to the other side of the street and hit the ground, giving off another brilliant flare and leaving an impact crater, then returned to Brandish's human form.

Victoria stared at Brandish in shock. Then she flinched and drew back her hand at a sudden burning pain. The skin on her hand was turning red, pulsing with a sensation she recognized from her last encounter with Lung's pyrokinesis. Brandish's blow had shorted out her forcefield, and the flare on impact had left behind a patch of superheated air that burned her skin.

_Impossible._ Mom's power didn't work like that. Her energy form was the purely defensive aspect of power, making her invulnerable to attack at the cost of power and mobility. She shouldn't be able to move on her own, shouldn't be able to _attack_.

Victoria looked to her sister but Amy hadn't even registered the attack. She was in the same slumped posture as before, tears welling up in her eyes, staring down at her hands as though they were soaked in blood.

"Nothing to say in your defense, Amelia?" Brandish sneered. "I know that guilty look. Of course I was right! You're a parasite who takes the love of others for yourself. Were you going to stop with my daughter, or were you going to violate my brain to make me love you too? I won't let you! I never wanted you. _I never loved you._ You never deserved a mother's love and you never will."

Victoria clenched her fists. "I told you to shut the fuck up! You're lying, you're crazy, you're wrong! You're..."

She swallowed, somehow managed to restrain herself from shutting the woman up by putting a fist through her lying mouth. Had to calm down. Had to calm _her_ down.

It _had_ to the the Simurgh. The Endbringer was more than a mile away and her song was faint, but she could hear it clearer than ever, the song that was wearing away at Mom's mind and making her believe her lies about Amy-

* * *

"When you fly you're so beautiful, so natural. It's what you were always meant to do. You truly belong in the heavens."

Victoria blushed.

"I mean it." said Amy. "When you take me in your arms and carry me into the nighttime sky, you have such a _majesty_ in your bearing. It's not just that you belong in the sky. It's that the sky belongs to _you_. You're the queen of the heavens, taking me to dance among your stars."

Victoria's heartbeat pounded in her ears as she tried to think of a worthy reply. _She_ was supposed to be the bold one, but her sister had poetry in her soul. It was impossible to match her in that arena - least of all now, with her thoughts jumbled by her blush - but she made an effort all the same.

"I, I could say the same about you." said Victoria. "With your power, you're so...caring, like a saint. You're the queen of...helping people, and...and their pets, too, and...and everything else on the earth!"

Amy laughed, and it was a laugh of simple delight, pure and honest as an angel's song. Not a hint of judgement or reproval. She forgave Victoria for her inarticulate passion and loved her all the more for it.

"You're elevating me to your level? Then that makes us queens of different domains. Yours over the heavens, and mine over the earth." Amy smirked. "Shame to say, I'm not a responsible queen. A queen puts her subjects first, but..." She leaned closer, gazed into Victoria's eyes. "I love you more than all the creatures of the earth."

Victoria hadn't realized she could blush more deeply. "Then I, I..." The words spilled out of her, fierce and passionate and somehow coming out _right_ for once. "I love you more than all the stars in the sky!"

* * *

Victoria blinked, a tear coming to her eye. The memory of her love was so perfect, so vivid and clear. As if she was living it for the first time. She wouldn't let her love be defiled by that woman's cruel words.

The solution was clear. Mom and Dad had taught her long ago. They had raised her with tales of heroism, told by people who knew what heroism _truly_ meant. There would always be setbacks and sacrifices, but in the end, the villains would fall to the heroes. The darkness would fall to the light. And hatred would be vanquished by love. She had to remind Mom of that love, of the ties that held their family together in the face of any adversity.

"You're sick. Listen to me Mom. I love you. You, the real you, loves Amy deep down. Please, please, please, let her heal you. You trust her. You raised her. She's your _daughter_. When...even when Amy and I told you we wanted to be together, that we wanted to get married when we're older, I was so scared of what you'd say but you agreed to it without a second thought! You helped us find a jurisdiction where it's legal, you were so pleased for us that you were on top of the world for a week, smiling so hard I thought you'd gone mad! You need to let Amy heal you, so you can see that future you're looking forward to. Okay, Mom? Please?"

As Victoria spoke she looked into her mother's eyes, waited to see the dawning light as her mother realized how far she had fallen, returned from her fit of insanity and saw reason...

...but her heart sank, as Brandish simply stared at her, uncomprehending. "When you get married. When you...when you..._what?_ When you get _married?_"

Brandish turned her gaze to Amy, sheer revulsion written on her face. "My God. I should have guessed. Amelia. When I said you diddled her brain I thought I was being metaphorical. I thought you couldn't possibly get any more disgusting. I was wrong. You managed it ten times over you _sickening little slut_."

"You...you don't even remember? You think that Amy..." Victoria squeezed her eyes shut. Every word the woman said was a punch to the gut. She tried to calm herself, found that it was impossible. She snapped open her eyes and glared. "Shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up! You're lying! That's not you. That's the Simurgh talking."

Victoria turned to Amy, rested a firm hand on her shoulder to give her support...and what she saw broke her heart.

Amy was on her knees, face in her hands, still whispering apologies, _pleading_, her voice so twisted it was no longer recognizable as human speech. It was sick, it was wrong. Her heroic, beautiful, caring sister, _pithed_ like this by her own mother's words. A sight so horrible shouldn't exist in this world.

Victoria knelt down and hugged her sister, glared at the woman who tormented her. "You're wrong, Mom. I love Amy. I trust her. One hundred percent. She's a good person. Amy would _never_ in a million years-"

Amy shuddered, a sob that wracked her entire body, and let out a pitiful, wordless wail.

"Amy, pull yourself together! You can't let her get to you. Remember our Master/Stranger training. That's not _her_ talking. That's not Mom. Come on, help me. We'll knock her out and you can fix her later. Amy. Amy. Amy!"

She shook her sister's shoulder, but she didn't respond to her touch. Paralyzed.

And in that moment Brandish attacked in a flare of light.


	8. Victoria 4

12:55 pm

Victora saw the blur of light out of the corner of her eye, felt her forcefield short out and a searing heat on the small of her back. She scrambled to get a grip on Amy to protect her.

Brandish's energy form rebounded from Victoria's back and caromed off a building on the other side of the street, shattering the brick wall and leaving behind a heat wave that scorched the building's wooden siding. Brandish returned to her human shape, negating her momentum and bringing herself to a stop, then immediately flickered back into her energy form. The energy form flared with yellow light and shot forward. Too soon, too fast. Her forcefield was still down. If she took a hit now...

Victoria fled. She couldn't think, couldn't make a plan, couldn't even comprehend how it had come to this. All she could think of was the burning pain on her back and the warmth of her sister's skin against hers and the Simurgh's scream resonating in her skull.

She fell back on her instincts. Her training from Aunt Sarah. _Gain altitude_. The best defense against an opponent who couldn't fly. It had saved her life against heavyweights like Hookwolf and Allfather.

Victoria hugged Amy tight and flew them straight up in the air. Brandish passed through the space they had vacated and slammed into a wall, leaving another superheated impact crater.

Brandish had never been able to fly before, but she showed no hesitation about taking to the air. She turned to her energy form and shot upward on a direct collision course. She was faster than Victoria, moved in a straight line without regard to air resistance or gravity.

Victoria saw her coming and dodged to the side. Brandish shot past them, returned to her human form and returned to the influence of gravity. A second later she flickered back into her energy form, arresting her fall, and shot toward them in a straight line. Victoria dodged again, escaping the hit by less than a foot this time.

"Mom, stop it! Amy, I need you to knock her out. If I get close-"

Another attack, then another, then another. Brandish was getting closer each time, more adapted to aerial combat. She couldn't maneuver. Each time she changed into her energy form, she could only propel herself in a straight line. But her energy form was invulnerable to attack, and if she changed into the energy form close enough to Victoria, her speed made her nearly impossible to dodge.

"Amy, get a hold of yourself! You're going to touch her and knock her out. Tell me you understand. Please, Amy, you have to!"

Only a soft whimper came in reply.

Brandish closed in, flickered to her energy form less than fifty feet away and shot forward on a course to hit Amy in the back. Victoria spun and took the hit on her forcefield, sending Brandish caroming away at an angle. A wave of heat roiled the air behind her, too, but she wasn't burned. They were flying at high enough speeds that the volume of heated air was left behind in milliseconds.

Victoria twisted in the air to keep her eyes on Brandish. A direct hit now, before her forcefield came back up, would probably kill her. She dodged as soon as she saw the energy form appear, managed to evade the attack by less than a foot, spun wildly as Brandish passed by to keep her in her line of sight.

It was a hopeless fight. Mom was attacking relentlessly, making a serious effort to _kill_ them, and her defensive power meant that they had no way of fighting back. It was taking everything Victoria had just to survive. They'd be killed the moment her concentration slipped.

If she could fly out of the city limits, get backup from the military and capes at the blockade...

Victoria spared a glance to the ground to judge their position and set herself on a course to exit the city...and then hurriedly changed directions in the next instant to avoid Brandish's oncoming attack. Victoria tried to resume her course only for Brandish to intercept her immediately with another attack, a streak of yellow light barring her path from leaving the city.

After three more attempts, Victoria realized that Brandish was herding them. Deliberately giving up opportunities to hit them, to ensure that they stayed within reach of the Simurgh's song.

Victoria's blood went cold.

_That's not Mom. Mom is dead. All that's left is an agent of the Simurgh._

As the woman shifted into her human form, preparing her next attack, Victoria felt her senses sharpen. Time slowed down. The woman's image in her eyes snapped into hyperfocus, presenting itself for her inspection in a frozen moment of time.

She had been thinking of this woman as Mom. The woman who loved them, who raised them, who supported them in everything they did. And that meant that she was _hesitating_. Trying to save her, trying to treat her as family. If she thought like that she wouldn't be able to truly fight her. She wouldn't use her full power, wouldn't strike to cripple or kill, wouldn't _end_ the threat.

And with that thought, she felt something unlock deep in her mind. A part of herself that had always been inside her, that had only awoken for brief seconds in times of desperation. In the panicked seconds after an ABB thug shot Gallant, when she had thought he took the hit to the flesh instead of his armor. In the fight in the bank, when the psycho bug controller nearly slit her sister's throat.

Now that part of her rose to the forefront of her mind and settled itself in place. Her thoughts went cold. The woman before her was Mom, but she wasn't _Mom_. She wasn't even a person. She was a...an enemy. A threat. A _thing_. Enemies like that were nothing more than rabid dogs to be put down, mechanical puppets without a soul. They had a lifelike appearance but that was just a facade, one of the tricks they used to fool you into letting down your guard while they plotted your demise.

Her mind was clear, now. The enemy in front of her wasn't going to fool her any longer. Not anymore.

The enemy flickered into its energy form and shot forward toward Victoria, aiming for Amy's body held in her arms.

Victoria didn't try to dodge this time. She gripped Amy with her left arm, shifting in place to protect her sister with her body, and raised her right arm to attack.

The enemy was at close range, moving so fast it was a blur. Hitting it with a punch would take millisecond timing. Like a baseball player hitting a hundred mile an hour fastball, if the distance to the mound was halved, and the baseball was a third of its size.

It wasn't even hard. Her mind was perfectly clear and focused. She saw the enemy's trajectory and swung her arm downward in an arc to intercept it. A blinding flare of light and heat, the soft pulse of her forcefield shorting out, and the enemy was hammered down to the ground. Sent down hundreds of feet in less than a second.

The yellow spark struck the top of a building, caved in the roof in a flash of light, and rebounded upward at the same speed. It rose up toward Victoria for another attack. Her punch hadn't had any effect. The enemy's energy form was too tough to damage.

Victoria felt a movement in her arms. Amy was shaking in fear, a soft whimper escaping from her lips at the sight of the yellow spark rising in the air to meet them.

No. _Unacceptable._ It was her job to protect Amy. They were two parts to a whole. Warrior and healer, passion and forethought, glory and guts.

Her sister was in pain right now because she hadn't been doing her job. Victoria should never have extended the potential enemy such an unreasonable amount of charity. She should have killed it as soon as it showed its true colors. Next time she wouldn't make that mistake. She wouldn't let the enemies hurt Amy ever again.

The spark of yellow light was rising, slightly off course to hit them. The enemy would soon activate its power and set itself on a new trajectory for attack. She wouldn't survive a hit. Her forcefield was shorted out and would be down for another second.

The safe thing to do would be to flee, to dodge. But Victora didn't feel fear any longer. She saw the flow of the battle. The enemy's attacks were regular, predictable, had been following a rhythm since the beginning. Energy form, attack, flicker, energy form, attack, flicker. A power-related effect, probably a fixed recharge time between shifting forms.

The details didn't matter. She could use it. Memories rose to her mind. Her past fights with timed-effect capes, her run-in with Alabaster and her spars with Battery. A common pattern fell into place. She matched the pattern with her current opponent and she found that predicting the enemy's course of action was easy. The enemy was going to shift forms to re-orient its trajectory in six tenths of a second, when it got within one hundred feet. An opportunity, a few hundreds of milliseconds when the enemy would be vulnerable to attack.

Victoria hugged Amy tight, shifted to shield her with her body, and flew directly at the enemy at her highest speed, right fist pulled back for a straight punch. The enemy followed it's pattern. It returned to its human form and had only an instant to react to the incoming punch. In that instant the enemy's face shifted through a riot of emotions. Hatred, wide-eyed shock, abject fear.

The enemy raised its hands and sprouted blades of light. Brandish's weapons, but _not_ her weapons. They should have been swords, long enough to cut a man in half in a single blow. These were smaller, five-inch blades sprouting from each fingernail like a cat's claws.

A moment of contact. Victoria swung her right fist and felt it connect with the enemy's chest and pierce through, a wet crack as bones and flesh were ripped apart. In the same instant she felt five of the enemy's blades slash through her right arm, the other five pierce her side and bury themselves in her gut. She let out a raw scream, a cry pulled from her throat by some primal reflex.

But she didn't care about the pain. All she knew was that she had _won_.

The enemy's body fell three hundred feet and landed on the street with a wet thump. Victoria followed it down and landed on the other side of the street. She placed Amy on the sidewalk, setting her down with infinite care. There was nothing she wanted more than to comfort her sister, to reassure her that it was all over. But...

Victoria looked at the broken body of the enemy. _Not taking any chances._ She flew to the body, making sure to keep herself interposed between it and Amy as she went. Then she drew back a hand to strike, and began the demolition. She worked in utter silence, the only sounds the faint voice of the Simurgh in the background and the crack of her fists and feet breaking flesh.

When she was done with her work she stood, breathing heavily. Her arms and legs were covered with blood and bits of the corpse. She noted absently that her right arm was missing below the elbow. The enemy must have severed it in the instant she landed her punch. It hadn't seemed important at the time. With her super strength, the stub of her right arm had been just as good as a weapon. There was a burning pain in her side, too. If she remembered Amy's anatomy lessons, the stabs to her body had hit her somewhere in the liver or pancreas or kidneys, probably a lethal wound.

But it was okay. Amy was here. She would fix everything, and then they would be fine.

Victoria flew to her sister and gave her a reassuring smile. "I beat the enemy. We're safe now. Heal me and I'll get us out of here."

Amy didn't reply. Didn't show any indication of understanding her. Amy was kneeling on the ground, arms limp at her sides, slack jawed, staring up at her with eyes wide and pupils fully dilated. She was trembling, shivering like she was having a minor epileptic seizure, or a moment of religious ecstasy.

Oh. Right. Victoria realized that her aura was on at full power. It must have gone up to full blast some time during fight. She ratcheted down her aura and kneeled next to Amy, wrapping her intact left arm around her in a half-hug.

"It's okay Amy. It's okay. It's okay." She stroked her sister's cheek, but she barely moved in response.

The chill in her mind was slipping away by the second. Emotion and color were returning to the world. As she contemplated the tear tracks on Amy's cheeks. As she studied the faint red tinge to Amy's skin where she had been burned by superheated air. As she absently wiped her remaining hand clean on the side of her dress, rubbing off the bits of meat and brain matter left over from the...the enemy...the enemy that had been...no, that really was...her mother...

Victoria winced and cut off that line of thought. She forced herself to focus on her sister. She used her good hand to grip Amy's chin and make her sister meet her gaze. She looked into Amy's eyes, searched for any sign of life for her to rekindle.

"Amy. Amy. Come back to me. We're safe now. We're safe. There's just one thing I need you to do for me. Can you do something for me, Amy?"

Amy's eyelids fluttered. She slowly nodded.

"Good. I need you to heal me. Just like you always do. I got hurt, and you need to heal me so I can save us. Can you heal me, Amy?"

Amy nodded again. She groped out with a hand, clumsily, mechnically, until she brushed it against Victoria's arm. Then she gripped Victoria with desperate strength, as though she was holding on for her life. The pain instantly drained away. Victoria felt her bleeding stop and her wounds slowly knitting together.

"Just the basics, okay? You can finish it later."

Amy nodded. She licked her dry lips, muttered under her breath. "Punctured pancreas, leaking digestive enzymes. That's the first priority. Punctured right kidney. Two bisected ribs, one fractured rib. Severed arm below the elbow, resulting in class II hemorrhage. Loss of body mass. I'll close the wound for now, but I need to requisition biomass for me to grow you a new arm. Where's Mister Wilson? We need to call the nurse to bring the, the..." She cast about, as if seeing the streets of the Docks for the first time. "...oh. Right. We'll have to find biomass out here. In one of these...buildings. Warehouses. Or, or we could find a few stray animals. Or rats. Or plants. Or..."

Victoria used her good hand to stroke her sister's cheek, and Amy trailed off and went silent.

"It's okay, Amy. We can do that later. Just tell me when we're ready to fly."

For a minute they sat next to each other in silence. Victoria rested her head against Amy's shoulder and closed her eyes. She felt her sister's power course through her body, knitting her together, a pleasant feeling of peace and recovery after the tension of the battle.

An explosion in the distance brought Victoria back to her senses. The Simurgh was still here in the city, somewhere. The faint song of the Endbringer tickled in the back of her mind.

"How are we doing on time?" she muttered.

Amy blinked at her.

"The time for the Simurgh. The time till we have to go." said Victoria.

Amy jolted out of her stupor, fumbled in her pocket with the hand she wasn't using to heal Victoria. She pulled out her phone and looked at the clock.

"Seven minutes past." she said.

Victoria went still.

Amy let the phone slip from her hands and clatter to the street. She turned to Victoria, and the look on her face was heartbreaking. Completely defenseless and utterly lost. Looking to her sister for anything and everything. For support, for direction, for _hope_. But Victoria had nothing to give her. She watched helplessly as Amy's face fell, a growing horror spreading until it erased her features entirely. The faint light that Victoria had rekindled in her eyes flickered, then dimmed, then slowly faded-

"No!" barked Victoria. "No. Don't you dare. You are _not_ allowed to give up, understand? We can still make it. We'll talk to the border guards, convince them to let us leave. Come on!"

Amy stared at her.

"Look, Amy, your timer, you set it when we were next to the Simurgh but now we're on the other side of the city. That's less exposure. We're not affected. We didn't commit any crimes, we didn't turn evil, we're _fine_. Come on, let's go!"

Victoria got to her feet and opened her arms, waited for Amy to join her. But Amy didn't move. She was looking at Victoria's left hand and the healed stump of her right, both stained bright red with blood. She was looking at the body on the street, the corpse that Victoria had beaten so badly that nothing was left but a fleshy pulp embedded in a crater.

Amy raised her hand to her cheek and touched a sticky smear of red. Her freckled face stained by Victoria's caress, with the blood and guts of...of...

Victoria swallowed. Amy was right. She had become a murderer. She had killed her own _mother_.

It had seemed so real. It...it _must_ have been real. There was no way that was one of the Simurgh's tricks. Victoria was completely sane. Their _mother_ was the insane one. The one who spewed hateful words and tried to kill her family.

But the murder marked her with an indelible stain. The guards would never let her go. It was almost impossible for powerful capes like her to get out of quarantine, even if they had a _spotless_ record. Everyone knew what the Simurgh had done to Hatved, to Sphere, to Carcharadon. The PRT wouldn't risk another incident like that happening ever again. They would lock her away for life. And they wouldn't bend the rules for her. All of her good works as a hero counted for nothing, now.

Victoria felt her eyes tear up. If it was just her, she could accept it. But not Amy. Amy was different. She was too _pure_ to be corrupted. Too moral, too goddamn stubborn. Even when the Simurgh had pushed Amy past the breaking point she didn't do _anything_ wrong. She healed Victoria, healed Mom, refused to hurt Mom even when she betrayed them and tried to kill them. A healer and a hero to the end.

No. _Unacceptable._ Victoria refused to accept the existence of a world where Amy couldn't be happy. There had to be a way to save her. There had to be a way to bring the light back into her eyes. There had to be.

"We don't have to stay here, Amy." said Victoria. "I can get us out. If you want. They can't hold me, I'm fast and I'm strong. I can fly us past the guards. Fly us into a forest, maybe, so they'll lose track of us with their satellites."

Amy slowly shook her head. In disbelief, or negation.

"You shouldn't have to stay here, Amy. You're good. A _good person_. Maybe we've been...poisoned, somehow, by the Simurgh, but we can make sure we don't hurt anyone. Listen. We'll...we'll do our own quarantine. A friendly one. Just for the two of us.

"We'll take on new identities. We'll find a quiet little town in the countryside. We'll rent a cottage, somewhere far out of the way, and we'll live there together for the rest of our lives. Somewhere peaceful where there aren't any criminals or villains or Endbringers. We won't use our powers anymore. We'll leave all this blood and death behind us, okay? We'll make extra sure we don't influence anyone. We won't talk with other people. We'll only go out for necessities, or go to a restaurant once in a while. Once a year, on our anniversary."

Victoria wiped a tear from her eye. It was hard to talk, her throat tightening up, but she had to keep going.

"I'll buy you supplies. You'll get to show your talents that you never got to use, because you got your power and had to spend all your time at the hospital. You can become a writer. Or an artist. Making beautiful works of art, that I'm the only one who gets to see. You'll teach me how to help, too, so I can be your assistant. We'll keep everything you make, hang it on the walls and in the attic and the basement.

"And, and one day. Someday. We'll be free to come out. When all the villains are beaten, and all the monsters are gone, and Scion finally kills the Simurgh. We'll open up the attic and set up a grand exhibition for the public, and show them all the art you've made, and we'll call it 'Memories of a Simurgh Victim.' There'll be a big fuss and reporters from all the big newspapers will be there. The artwork you create, it'll be a symbol of all that beauty and vision and potential they quarantined away, and that's _free_ now, totally totally free, for everyone to see, and they'll all be so glad to have you back, and, and..."

Amy pushed herself to her feet, took an unsteady step forward, and wrapped her in a hug.

Victoria sobbed, bowed her head and rested it on Amy's shoulder. She realized that she was crying. The tears she had suppressed during the fight were coming out, now that it was all over. The last of their hopes had been dashed, now, and they only had fairy tales for consolation.

She didn't know how much time passed as they held each other in their arms. Her tears poured freely down her cheeks. She felt her emotions pouring out with them, her mind going blessedly blank and empty. They simply stood together and let the distant sounds of the world pass by without comprehension. The Simurgh's cry, the explosions and earth shaking rumbles from across the city.

Victoria was finally broken out of her trance by a sound close by. The roar of a jet engine coming from above. A massive suit of armor landed across the street, plumes of smoke trailing from its engines. The suit had two great wings, more than a dozen cannons studded on its arms and legs, and a head with vaguely lizard-styled eyes and fangs.

_Dragon._

Landing beside her were Aunt Sarah and Cousin Eric, in their costumed identities of Lady Photon and Shielder. They looked exhausted but they were in good health. No mutations like Mom had said. Another one of Mom's lies.

And in Lady Photon's arms was a third familiar face. A woman in a white and orange costume with a crossed blade emblem on the chest. She called out to them in a familiar voice-

"Victoria! Amy! Thank God you're alive!"

Carol Dallon. Brandish. _Mom._

Victoria's eyes went wide. It was impossible. Mom was dead. She had killed her herself! She stared at the woman in Lady Photon's arms, then looked at the bloody wreck embedded the street, then looked back at the woman. The Simurgh victim, the betrayer, the one who tried to kill _Amy_, she was back and it was impossible, impossible, what the hell was she supposed to do-

The stress in her brain hit a critical threshold and she felt her mind shift. Her thoughts went smooth and cold, sank into familiar calculations of threats and defenses, allies and enemies. She knew how to handle this.

Victoria clenched her hand into a fist.

_Another one._


	9. Victoria 5

1:04 pm

"Vicky, Amy, I'm so glad you're safe! We couldn't find you, we thought you were-"

Victoria ignored the enemy's words and studied her new opponent, searching for weaknesses, vulnerabilities. The _thing_ in front of her looked like Mom but it wasn't _Mom_, not anymore. It was a soulless husk, a ruthless killer. She had learned that lesson the hard way.

The enemy would probably have a new set of powers, like the last time. Attacking in its energy form, altered range on its hard-light constructs, or something less predictable. Worst of all, the enemy had somehow _come back_ after she killed it the first time. Ressurection, or a split mind with two selves, or had some other obscure power with the same effect.

Her thoughts came in a steady rhythm, in time with the faint song of the Simurgh that had become a familiar backdrop to her thoughts. Was that what this thing was? A plot of the Simurgh, a ressurection-themed cape turned into the Endbringer's pawn, to impersonate Mom and lead the heroes into ruin? If she killed it again, there was no guarantee it would stay down-

Victoria set her jaw. It didn't matter. She'd kill the damned thing however many times it took until it _stayed_ dead.

The problem was that the rest of her family didn't realize the danger. The enemy was climbing down from Lady Photon's arms, with Shielder looking on as if nothing was wrong. All the while leering at her with a disgusting expression of fake relief on its face. A liar. A deceiver.

"Mom? Is...is that you?" came a soft voice from behind her.

Oh no. Amy. Even after what the enemy did to her, even after it tried to _kill_ her, her saintly sister was willing to hope for a world where Mom was still the good woman who raised them.

Victoria wouldn't let Amy fall for the enemy's lies again. She would have to end this quickly. Draw the enemy away from her family and kill it before they could come to its defense. Then she would explain everything, tell them the truth, and everything would be fine.

Victoria edged back toward Amy, putting herself bodily between her sister and the enemy. She licked her lips and tried to paste a smile on her face. It felt unnatural, like a death mask.

"Mom! You came!" she forced herself to say. "I'm, I'm so glad to see you. Come here!"

She spread out her arms, her intact left arm and the stub of her right, as though asking for a hug. The bloodstains probably ruined the effect.

The enemy's jaw dropped, a fake expression of sympathy. "My God, what happened to you?"

And then, a stroke of good fortune. The enemy left the protection of her family and came at them in a dead run, arms rising at its sides, preparing to use its hard-light blades to cut them apart. An attack disguised as a preparation for a loving embrace, for the sake of the witnesses.

The enemy had made a severe miscalculation. Did it simply not realize that Victoria had killed its other self? Did it think it could fool her like it had done to the rest of her family? Or had it realized that Victoria was on to her, and charged in a last, desparate attempt to kill her before she could expose its deceptions?

Victoria saw how the fight would unfold with perfect clarity. She knew her own speed, knew the enemy's reaction time. She would wait until the enemy got within ten feet, then lunge forward with a flight-enhanced straight left to the center of the chest. Her momentum would keep her going forward, knock the enemy's body to the ground so she could follow up with a finishing blow to the head, to stop the enemy from pulling any tricks with its last seconds of life.

Just one more second, then-

A wall of blue light flashed into existence, blocking her path and knocking the enemy to the ground. A forcefield. Shielder's power.

"Sorry Brandish, but-"

The enemy was on its feet in a flash, pressing its hand against the forcefield with splayed fingers, desperate to get at them. "Now is not the time, Shielder! They were just in a fight, they need us! Vicky, your arm..."

Victoria clenched her fist. She had wanted to end it quickly. But she realized that this was for the best. Her family was wary of the influence of the Simurgh and was treating her like a ticking time bomb. Shielder was keeping a wary eye on her, the same stance he took toward villains during a stand-off, and Lady Photon was staring at her and Amy like they were ghosts. If she killed the enemy here, her family would think that _she_ was the Simurgh's pawn. They would try to kill her, and probably kill Amy too.

And behind them was _Dragon_. The world's greatest Tinker, wearing a two-story tall battlesuit designed for fighting the Simurgh. Victoria didn't like the looks of the cannons studding its arms and legs, four of which were pointed in her direction. Whatever they were, they were designed to hit an enemy with the reflexes of a precog and the durability of an _Endbringer_. If Dragon became an enemy, her speed and forcefield weren't going to cut it.

"I know, Carol, we want to hope, but look at them." said Lady Photon. "They're covered in blood. We can't take any chances."

The enemy pressed its hand again against the forcefield. Tears were welling in the corners of its eyes. It was absurd, how badly it wanted to kill them.

Dragon took a step forward. Smooth and graceful, not the lumbering gait she would have expected from the massive battlesuit. Her voice came from a speaker on the suit's lizard-styled head, faintly accented and with a mechanical echo to her words.

"Panacea, Glory Girl. We need to confirm that you're below threshold exposure to the Simurgh. Step away from the phone."

"What?" said Victoria.

Dragon pointed with a talon. "The phone on the ground, identifying itself as property of Amy Dallon. The cell network is down but I can use the accelerometer logs to estimate your time-position data for the last hour."

Amy scrambled back from the phone, and Victoria followed her like a shadow. Shielder's forcefield changed shape, curved to put them on one side and the phone on the other. Dragon took two long steps forward and tapped the phone with one of the talons of her feet.

"What happened to you?" repeated the enemy.

Victoria rested her hand on Amy's shoulder, and spoke for the benefit of the heroes. "The Simurgh attacked Arcadia, we got trapped in the gym. Amy healed me and I flew us out here. Then..."

She looked at the bloody pulp embedded in the street. The last enemy's corpse.

"Oh God. You were attacked by the clones." said the enemy. "You won. I'm proud of you. That can't have been easy, to kill someone you thought was human."

"Clones?" said Amy. Victoria felt her sister tense under her hand. She knew something?

"There's a crazy Case-53 fighting the Simurgh, they're calling her Echidna. She's a monster regenerator, won't stay down, and if she touches you she makes clones. Evil beasts, twisted, they want to kill everyone. She got me, Mark, Sarah, we got away but she, she _ate_ Crystal, she's been spitting out dozens of evil _things_."

"Clones." said Amy. "These...clones. They have the same memories as the original person? The same-" Her voice cracked, broke. "The same _personality_?"

"Oh no." The enemy's face shifted into a mask of pure horror.

"Mom? It's really you, right?" said Amy, her voice wavering. "You came back, you came to save us, and not, not to-"

Victoria tightened her grip on Amy's shoulder, felt her heartbeat speed up at her words. For a moment the cold certainty loosened its grip on her mind and a splash of color returned to the world. She could almost believe the outrageous lies the enemy was telling to cover up its ressurection. In front of her was Mom, her _real_ Mom, come back to save them from the Simurgh. The expression of horror on her face showed her sympathy for the trials her daughters had been put through at the Endbringer's hands-

Victoria shook her head to clear it. No. Couldn't let herself be fooled like the rest. Of course the enemy was horrified, it was realizing that it had been found out, making up desperate lies to save itself. She had to expose it quickly, put her family on guard before it could strike.

"_Liar!_ Sarah, Eric, watch out! That's not Carol, she's going to kill you!"

Her family simply stared at her, didn't react. Victoria glanced at Dragon, but the Tinker's cannons were still aimed at them, hadn't turned to face the real threat. Fuck, they were going to get killed!

"Get away from her! The last one acted right, fed us some convenient story about mutations and said it loved us, all up until it turned into a bitch from hell! That _thing_ tried to make Amy kill herself, said the most evil disgusting shit I've ever heard! Tried to kill Amy, an agent of the Simurgh, forced us into her range so I had to kill it. Should have fucking killed it as soon as it opened its fucking mouth! I, I had to fucking kill it and now it's back and it won't fucking _die_! Don't just stand there. It's not Mom, it's an enemy and it's going to kill you unless you kill it first so _move_, hurry, hurry, kill it!"

Victoria's voice rose into a scream and she stood trembling with rage, pointing at the enemy with the stub of her right arm. The enemy stared back at her, eyes wide, a tear falling from its cheek. Mouthing silent denials.

"Holy fuck, Vicky." said Shielder. He started to say more, but Lady Photon stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

"Victoria, I'm sorry you had to go through that." she said. "This is your mother. The real one. She's been with us the whole time."

"You don't _know_ that! Don't let her fool you!"

The enemy babbled, desperate to keep up its front. "No, Vicky, please, you're not thinking-"

"I'm sorry, Carol, but she's not listening to you. Let me handle this." said Lady Photon. She turned back to Victoria.

"No, Victoria. She's your real mother. The one you saw looked wrong, didn't it? You can tell the clones at a glance. They're deformed, mutated, and they come out naked. They don't have uniforms. They might be wearing stolen clothes." Lady Photon glanced at the corpse on the street, the bloody scraps of a white tee shirt and khaki pants. "I know it's hard. I had to kill clones of my own daughter, before there were too many and we had to run. Don't let it break you. Please. We've lost enough today."

Victoria tensed, like a trapped animal. They were all against her. She looked back and forth at her aunt, her cousin, at Dragon, all staring at her sadly as if _she_ was the one who was mistaken. And at the enemy, the enemy they said was _not_ an enemy, the, the...the _woman_ they said was Mom, with grief on her face that she had never seen before, but she _couldn't_ be Mom, she-

"Vicky, please. They're right." came Amy's soft voice from her side.

Victoria turned to Amy, eyes wide. Amy's face was scrunched up with guilt. Not quite meeting her eyes. "I could tell something was wrong, when I touched that thing, but...but I was so afraid for her, I thought it was because of a power that hit her, and she acted like Mom at first, so I, I...I was wrong. I fucked up. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. That thing you killed, Vicky, it wasn't her. It wasn't. You're not a murderer."

The chill in her thoughts thawed at her sister's words, the colors slowly returning to the world. Two streaks of orange leapt out in her sight, the crossed blades in bright orange on the woman's chest. Mom's emblem as a hero. She wanted so badly to believe it was true, but...but if it was true, that meant that Mom was alive, that she was safe and free, while she and Amy were...

"I'm sorry, we have to cut this conversation short." said Dragon. "Panacea, Glory Girl. Your exposure is far beyond threshold. If you had joined the fight with a standard Protectorate kit your armbands would have self-destructed fifteen minutes ago. For your family's safety, as well as your own, I need to ask you to be silent and remain in the quarantine zone. New Wave capes, your exposure is close to the limit. If you fly at maximum speed you'll make it out with minutes to spare. Go now."

Victoria felt Amy shudder at her side. The final nail in their coffin. She should have reacted to that, too, but she felt nothing at all. Too much emotional upheaval, to little sense of what the hell was going on, of who was a friend and who was an enemy. She was as tense as a live wire.

Besides, she had already known that it was too late for her and her sister. All they could do was be glad that some of her family had survived. Her dad, her aunt, one of her cousins, and...

"No!" cried the woman. The one who was supposed to be Brandish. Her Mom.

Lady Photon roughly grabbed her from behind and lifted her into the air. She called out from over her shoulder. "I'm sorry, Victoria, Amy. We love you. Stay strong. Do us proud, okay-"

"No, don't, don't go!" Brandish struggled in Lady Photon's arms for a moment, then finally gave in and waved to her daughters. "My girls! I love you! Mark loves you! Stay stafe! We'll, we'll see you again! I promise!"

"Shielder, come on. Let's go." called Lady Photon.

Shielder didn't move to follow. He kept his forcefield in place and looked up at Dragon. "Dragon, you coming?"

"I have duties on the battlefield. Go now, Shielder. You need Lady Photon's help to make it out in time."

Shielder gestured. "Shouldn't you be going then? The fight's that way."

Dragon glanced at him, then turned back to Amy and Victoria. "My suit is calculating an efficient path. _Go_."

"Oh yeah? Hey Mom, you think she's calculating a path? You believe that?"

Shielder raised his head to Lady Photon. She pursed her lips and didn't respond. Shielder gave her a sharp look, then turned back to Dragon. "'Cause I don't think so. I seem to remember a briefing about Endbringers that says you're lying."

Brandish's eyes widened. "Oh God. No! No no no! Not when I just found them again!"

Brandish struggled free of Lady Photon's grip and fell to the ground, flickering into her energy form for an instant to cushion her fall. She ran to the forcefield, in front of Amy and Victoria, and faced Dragon, summoning blades of light to her hands.

Dragon let out a sigh, the voice modulation in her suit making it come out like a low, electronic crackle. "I'm sorry, Brandish. I didn't want you to have to see this. Stand down."

The blue forcefield shifted in place. Victoria, Amy, and the rest of the New Wave on the same side. Dragon on the other.

"Stand down, Shielder." said Dragon.

"What the hell is going on?" shouted Victoria.

"I'll ask you to cooperate willingly." said Dragon. "Amelia Dallon, a.k.a. Panacea."

Amy flinched in place, stared up at the battlesuit. Victoria hugged her protectively with her good arm.

"I'm sorry, Panacea. Your power is an A-class threat with greater than ten percent potential to escalate to S-class, and you have been compromised by the Simurgh. Pursuant to the Federal Disaster Response Act and the Preservation of Civilization Treaty, Article 22, clause 4b, the PRT has designated you as the subject of a kill order. Protectorate members are required to use lethal force to end the threat."

Dragon raised her battery of cannons, each weapon moving independently, tracking their targets with a machine's speed and precision. The weapons on her arms tracked the members of New Wave, Brandish and Shielder on the ground and Lady Photon in the air. And the two largest cannons at her side were aimed directly at Amy and Victoria.


	10. Victoria 6

1:09 pm

Victoria held Amy in her arms and stared at Dragon's battery of cannons. She had been wrong, so wrong. She had slipped into a mindset of black and white, enemies and allies, and...and that had been _right_, but she had been so very wrong about the _scale_ of the threat. She had been fixated on the idea of a single enemy, a nemesis in their midst. It had seemed so simple. Bring the enemy to light, kill it with a punch, and then everything would be fine. The world would be set right in the span of an instant.

That was impossible, now. The world itself was against them.

Dragon kept one set of cannons trained on the New Wave and aimed a second set around Shielder's forcefield, barrels pointing into the air and down toward the ground. Attacks angled to go around the shield and explode with lethal force, or homing shots to curve and hit them from behind. Shielder responded instantly, shaping his shield into a sphere to protect them from all directions.

"Panacea, I'm asking you to turn yourself in." said Dragon. "I promise you that you will be remembered as a hero, and your loss will not be in vain. Your surviving family will receive a support stipend and the PRT will make a sizable donation in your name to your preferred charities. Now _stand down_, Shielder. I understand your distress, but you won't win this fight. If you leave now I will do my best to convince the PRT not to press charges on your family for harboring a parahuman Simurgh victim and violating the truce."

"Fuck that and fuck you!" snarled Shielder. "The monsters took Crystal, I'm not going to let you take my cousins too!"

Lady Photon landed beside him. "Eric, you know the rules, we agreed-"

"No! No one else dies today. What the fuck am I good for if I can't protect anyone?"

Victoria met eyes with Brandish. Beneath the woman's glistening tears was a hard glint in her eye. The familiar look she took on as Carol Dallon in the courtroom, on Brandish in a superpowered battle, as her mind raced to find a way out to pull her family out of a disaster.

_It's really her. It's Mom._

Victoria felt tears come to her own eyes. She needed her. Everything had become so fucked up and she wanted Mom to come and make everything okay like she always did. She wanted to fly forward and hug her, thank her for coming back for them, collapse and cry and sob in the safety of her arms.

But there was no time. They had to survive, first. And to do that they had to beat the enemy in front of them.

What could they do? Stay behind the shield? Dragon's cannons were meant to hurt an Endbringer. Even Shielder and Lady Photon combined wouldn't hold up for long. Escape, fly away with Amy? Victoria was fast, but not faster than a laser, and the cannons were meant to hit the _Simurgh_.

It would have to be an attack. Dragon was tough but her suit and cannons looked like they were designed for long-ranged combat, and the tinker had made the mistake of coming within fifty feet of a family with lightning-fast attacks. Victoria's own shield could only take a single hit, but it could take a hit from _anything_. Fly straight forward and aim for the center of mass, tank a hit from whatever Dragon shot at her, and she'd be sure of getting off at least one clean hit. She was willing to bet that her super strength would do serious damage to Dragon's suit, maybe even hurt the woman inside. Buy time for Mom to tear off some of the cannons, hope Shielder and Lady Photon could protect her long enough to get off a second blow, use their lasers to jam more of the cannons, and then...

"Victoria Dallon, a.k.a. Glory Girl. Stand aside. If you defend her I am authorized to use lethal force. If you don't...capes of your power are rarely allowed out of quarantine, but standing aside here will do a great deal to establish your good will to the PRT. When the time comes for your psych evaluation, I will personally vouch for your selfless heroism in trying circumstances."

"Bullshit!" shouted Victoria. "Amy didn't do anything wrong! She's a hero, a healer, the greatest healer in the world! She's a saint!"

"I believe you. This isn't about her motivations." Dragon returned her gaze to Amy. "Panacea. You know how the Simurgh operates. You have the potential to cause a catastrope, even if you remain heroic and obey the quarantine. The harm you cause may be entirely unintentional, a seemingly minor mistake or a lapse in judgement."

Amy flinched in Victoria's arms, gripped the stub of Victoria's right arm in her own.

"It is extremely likely that you are the focus of the Simurgh's plots in Brockton Bay. By your own admission you were the Simurgh's first target, and rather than killing you she trapped you underground to force you to suffer full exposure to her scream, then subjected you to extreme mental and physical trauma."

Dragon lowered her head, looked Amy in the eyes. "This is for your own good, and for the good of your family. You're a hero, Panacea. Every time you went out in costume you put yourself at risk to save the lives of countless innocents. I'm asking you to stay true to your convictions, your values before the Simurgh touched you, and make that sacrifice now."

Amy's grip on her arm was tight, so tight. Victoria leaned her head forward and spoke, close to her ear. "Amy, don't listen to her. She doesn't know you. You're a good person. _I_ trust you. We all do."

Amy's voice was a whisper. "No. You shouldn't. You, you..." she swallowed. "It's okay. You can let go. I'm okay with it. It's the rules, we agreed. I fucked up so many times today and I can't fix it and everything I do just makes everything worse. And, and it's going to keep happening, I can see it, _every day like this_. I have to...have to stop while I'm ahead. While I'm not completely unforgivable. Have to stop the bleeding."

"Amy-"

"_It's okay._ This way I can...I can go, and you can live. I'll be happy with just that. Dragon is right, I don't deserve it, not anymore, but you deserve a chance at a happy life."

Victoria closed her eyes, pressed her face against the side of her sister's head and neck, felt the soft warmth of her skin on her own. She couldn't bear to see her sister like this. For this mask of pain to be the look on her face in her last moments, the last time she felt her touch, the last time she...

No. _Unacceptable._ A world where her sister died, where she _wanted_ to die, was not allowed to exist.

Victoria spoke, her voice firm. "No. Never. I'm never letting you go. I can't be happy without you. I can't be _anything_ without you. I love you. Mom and Dad and Sarah and Eric and the rest, we all love you. We're your family, we're here for you. We'll protect you."

Amy was still and silent in her arms. Victoria could feel her breathing, could feel her heart beating, so fast she could barely tell one beat from the next. So vibrant, brimming with life. She felt her own aura spiking, vibrating in time with her sister's heartbeat, a sympathetic reaction.

"Please, Amy. You fixed me up so many times when I was about to die. Now it's my turn. We'll fix this up and make everything right again. I promise. Trust me. Just trust me this one time."

Amy bowed her head. She licked her lips, opened her mouth to give her reply. A soft whisper, a single word.

Victoria never heard it. Dragon interrupted, her mechanical voice louder than before. "New Wave, this is your last warning. You're letting the Simurgh manipulate you. You think you're protecting your family but you're only putting them and countless other families at risk. Stand down _now_."

Brandish took a step forward, to the edge of the forcefield. "You said you were going to help us find my daughters. You didn't say it was a ploy to _kill_ them!"

"It wasn't. I hoped it wouldn't come to this. I'm not your enemy, Brandish. I would do the same if the Simurgh compromised any other potential S-class threat. Monstrum, or Blasto, or Eidolon. Or me." Two of Dragon's cannons glowed with a faint red light. "Shielder, you have ten seconds before I escalate to lethal force against New Wave."

"I respected you." said Brandish. "I thought you were one of our best. But you're _heartless_."

"I get that a lot during Simurgh attacks. But I do what I do because it saves the lives of good heroes and civilians."

"And now? You're overwhelmed fighting _two_ S-class threats in the city. In the middle of that mess you're parking your top of the line battlesuit out here in the Docks, wasting your resources to murder innocents? To murder _us_, a team of heroes on your side, on the off chance my daughters _might_ someday be a threat?"

Brandish raised her arms, readied her blades of light. "You won't get out of this with those cannons of yours intact, I promise you. You'll be in no shape to fight the real threats. Where's the _greater good_ there?"

Dragon stood still as a statue. A long moment of silence, broken only by the faint song of the Simurgh.

Victoria gave Amy a last squeeze, then moved forward and prepared to attack. She would throw herself at Dragon, trust her shield to stop the first hit, try to break the suit's armor and tackle it to the ground, hold it in place while Brandish used her blades to reach the woman inside-

"I see. I'm forced to compromise." said Dragon. Her voice had a lighter tone than before. Relief, or satisfaction. "But there will be no negotiation. I will leave Panacea and Glory Girl unharmed. The rest of you will leave the city with me and enter maximum-security containment until you are judged fit for release by the PRT. A minimum of six months, given your level of exposure and interactions with compromised capes. Will you cooperate?"

"Yes." said Brandish. No hesitation. She looked to the others for confirmation, saw nods from Shielder and Lady Photon.

"Good." said Dragon. A small compartment on Dragon's suit opened and released two small, black devices into the palm of her taloned hand. She tossed them to the ground at the edge of the forcefield, in front of Amy.

"Panacea, Glory Girl. A gift for you two. These are PRT issue smartphones modded for quarantine, incapable of sending data to the outside. They're loaded with a threat-tracker that will show you the positions of Simurgh, Echidna, and the clones we know about." Dragon leaned forward. "Keep these on your person at _all times_ and stay well away from the threats. None of us want to deal with villainous clone Panaceas. Understand?"

Victoria felt the tension that had coiled inside her drain away. This was it, then. They had done it. "Yes."

"Good. New Wave, your flight is too slow to escape threshold exposure. I'll carry you with my suit. You have ninety seconds to make your goodbyes. I warn you, however, that deliberate interactions with Simurgh victims will extend your detention. Skin contact with Panacea will make you a level 4 biohazard and require class V decontamination before release. A minimum of twenty months, given current backlogs, with indefinite detention for a less than perfect bill of health."

"I get it." said Shielder. "Hey, Amy!"

Lady Photon put her hand on his shoulder and shook her head, but he shook her off. "Amy, I stuck my neck out for you so I figure you owe me big time. By the time we convince the feds to let you out I'll be legal to drink and I'm going to join a party frat in college to piss off Mom, so I'll hit you up for a couple of new livers. Got it?"

Amy tried to smile, didn't quite manage it. "Sure, Eric. As many livers as you want."

"Great. Vicky." Shielder took on a more sober tone. "That monster's still spitting out clones of Crystal. I'm trusting you to put the fear of Glory in them. Tell them they're a disgrace to my sister and kill the shit out of them."

That's right, the monster had gotten Crystal. But Eric was holding up, somehow. He was doing it for their sake, she realized. Giving them a last moment of normalcy before they were locked away from the world.

Victoria forced herself to smile. "Got it. Hey, Eric. Don't you dare keep your old promise. I like your hair the way it is. If you go blonde in my honor I'll break out and kick your ass."

"You wish. I'll do a tricolor. Platinum for you, brown for Amy, red for Crystal. They'll call me the Neapolitan."

"That's enough, Eric." said Brandish. She brushed past Shielder and wrapped Victoria in a hug. Victoria held her tight. Trying to memorize the feeling, the touch of the mother she wouldn't see again for years or decades.

"Victoria. My beautiful daughter." Brandish buried her face in the crook of her daughter's neck. "I'm so sorry I couldn't protect you."

"I love you Mom. Don't...don't worry about me. About us. Take care of Dad. He needs you. Tell him I'm...I'm looking forward to playing powered baseball in the back yard with him again. He'd better work on his explosive curveballs."

Brandish pulled back, and kissed Victoria on the forehead. She met Victoria's gaze, her eyes bright sparks above the tear tracks on her cheeks.

"Of course, Vicky. Of course. We'll see you again one day. I promise. I know you'll be good. My little superhero. Do us proud, and take care of your sister."

Brandish stepped back. Her costume was smeared with dried blood from Victoria's arms and dress, but she didn't seem to care. She turned to Amy.

Amy hugged her arms to her chest. "It's okay. You shouldn't come close. You...the other you. She said my dad is Marquis. She said you never wanted me, you never loved me. I always knew it, sort of, but...I understand. It's okay. You were right. And just now, you saved me, because you're a hero and heroes save people even if they don't deserve it. That's already too good for me, so you don't have to-"

Brandish took a step forward, closer to Amy, then stopped. Hesitated.

Victoria's breath caught in her throat. Her feelings were a mess. Tension, fear, relief, sorrow. And now, beneath it all, she felt a familiar ember of _anger_, a scream of rage in the back of her mind. After going through all that for the sake of her sister, her mother still couldn't treat her with a mother's love! It had _always_ been like this! The scream in her mind reached a peak, and a memory rose before her eyes-

* * *

Victoria eyed her new sister with more than a little resentment. She had always wanted to have a brother or sister. She had bugged Mom and Dad over and over to make another baby like Auntie Sarah and Uncle Neil did. Then they finally got her a sister, but the 'sister' was way too old. She was supposed to be a _baby_, younger and littler than her, so she could be a cool big sister and boss her little sister around.

This 'Amelia' didn't like to be bossed around. And she didn't like to play outside with Dad like Victoria. She didn't like a lot of things, in fact. And she was a crybaby. Like if you asked her about who she used to live with. Mom said that Amelia's old dad had been a Bad Man who did Bad Crimes to people. So Victoria had asked Amelia if her Bad Dad had done any Bad Crimes to _her_, which was a completely sensible question, but Amelia had hit her and never apologized for it, even after Mom tried to make her say sorry.

Victoria had been a little impressed with that, actually. Mom was _good_ at making people say sorry, even old rich Bad Men in suits in a courtroom, so it was kind of cool to see a kid her age who could resist the sheer force of her Momness.

Now they were doing coloring books, and she once again felt that strange mix of awe and resentment. Jealousy, she thought it was called. Victoria had thought she was pretty good at coloring, but Amelia was _much better_ at it. They both colored outside the lines sometimes, true. But when Victoria did it, it was on accident, and when Amelia did it, it was on purpose. Like to give the superhero a fancy cape and a yellow hat with spikes, like a crown.

So it was with great interest that Victoria watched as Amelia picked up the white crayon - the stupid crayon that _no one_ uses - and started drawing on top of the superhero's fancy colored clothes. Was there a method to her madness? Or had the coloring prodigy finally cracked under the strain of creating high art?

Amelia noticed the attention she was getting, and smiled a small smile. She pushed down hard with the white crayon and drew straight lines on top of the superhero's arms and legs, and then started making a fancy shape on his chest with criss-crossing lines, like a cage. By the time Amelia got up to the head, Victoria realized what she was doing and laughed.

"A skellington. He's doing trick-or-treat! No way. Heroes don't do trick-or-treat!"

"Why not?" said Amelia.

"'Cause it's not October, silly!"

Amelia smiled. "Everyone has a skeleton. Twenty four seven, three sixty five. That's what Daddy says."

"He's creepy."

Amelia nodded. "Yeah. But creepy people are sometimes right."

Victoria frowned at that. It sounded like one of the Bad Ideas that Mom and Dad had warned her about. She was about to raise a profound objection when Mom came into the room.

"Mom, Mom!" Victoria called. "Tell us whose drawing is better! It's me, right?"

"Okay, dear, I'll take a look." said Mom with a smile. She looked at the coloring books and...her expression changed in an instant. The warmth drained away. Cold, dead, _hate_.

Mom ripped out the page from Amelia's coloring book and threw it in the trash.

Amelia drew back, shocked, then chased after her. "Carol no! Give it back!"

"Amelia. You could have colored in the superheroes, or drawn anything else you liked, but you decided to draw people _dying_. Don't you dare make such a morbid thing again."

"No, he's alive! Everyone has a skeleton. It's anatomy. It's what doctors do. Don't you like doctors?"

"I don't want to hear it. You're six years old, Amelia. Do you know who else draws morbid things when they're six? Villains. That's what Bad Guys do. They make sick drawings when they're small, and then they make sick things happen in reality when they're big. I won't have you doing that in my house. I forbid it!"

Amelia wordlessly clutched her mangled coloring book to her chest and ran out of the room.

Mom sighed. "Your drawing is very nice, Vicky. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go handle your sister."

Victoria stared at Mom's retreating back. Weird. _She_ had thought Amelia's drawing was pretty cool. But there was no accounting for taste, or for the inscrutable vagaries of Momness-

* * *

A distant memory she had almost forgotten. So _that_ was why Mom had freaked out on Amy back then. And with that, a flood of other memories locked into place, suddenly made sense. It had always been obvious that Mom played favorites, but she had thought it was a simple bias in favor of her genetic daughter. Now she realized that it was far worse than that.

The fake Mom, the clone, had been telling the truth. Mom had adopted Amy but she had never wanted her, had never _loved_ her. She had seen her as little more than a miniature Marquis, a villain-in-training she had been forced to take into her home. She had been resolved to grind her under her heel from day one, scolding her when she didn't live up to her perfectionist ideals of heroism, always ready with handcuffs to arrest her if she broke under the strain.

And now her mother was going to _get away with it_. Get flown off into the sunset by Dragon to live happily ever after, without anyone calling her out on the crap she pulled on Amy before she condemned her to a lifetime in quarantine. Using her last moment of contact with her daughter to give her an absolute confirmation that her parents _never cared for her_. A dirty trick the fake Mom would have been proud of. Leaving Victoria to the impossible task of picking up the pieces and putting her sister back together, trying to pull Amy back from the brink of a _deathwish_ alone in a desolate wasteland with the entire world against them as enemies.

No. Unacceptable. She wouldn't let that woman break Amy and get away with it. Victoria clenched her fist, advanced on the woman, and-

And Brandish stepped forward, embraced Amy, and kissed her on the forehead. Uncaring about the skin contact, uncaring about the flecks of blood from her other self that touched her lips.

"Amy." she said. "I have _always_ loved you. From the bottom of my heart."

Victoria froze in place, eyes wide.

Brandish leaned forward and hugged Amy tighter, rested her forehead against hers. "I'm so sorry that it's taken me this long to show it. My beautiful girl."

"Mom." Amy's voice wavered. Her eyes were wet. No tears left, after what they had been through, but the feeling was still there. She slowly raised her arms and hugged her mother back. "It's...it's alright. I love you too. I love you."

"I know Mark was a better parent to you. I was too cold. I saw too much of your father in you. Now I've learned to see the _you_ in you, and there's no time left for me to make it right."

Brandish released Amy, but Amy wouldn't let her go, clung to her fiercely. Brandish brushed a strand of hair out of Amy's face and stroked her cheek. "I'll do everything I can, from the outside. All my training as a lawyer has to be good for something."

Amy sobbed. "Thanks for...thanks for everything. For being my Mom. For teaching me to be a hero. I'm sorry I couldn't be a better one."

"No apologies. You have nothing to be ashamed of. And-" Brandish raised her hand, as if to forestall an objection. "If you do something less than perfectly heroic, it's not the end of the world. Everyone makes mistakes. Even your Mom and Dad." She managed a small smile. "Like threatening a famous hero during the Endbringer truce."

Amy let go of Brandish and studied her face. Searching for something in her eyes. "You did that for me..."

Brandish nodded. "That's why we founded New Wave. Better to do what you think is right and accept responsibility for your actions, than to pretend you're perfect and hide your dirty deeds with lies." She directed a glare at Dragon.

Dragon's voice came from her battlesuit. "Your time is up. We're going."

Brandish returned her gaze to Amy, to Victoria. "Do us proud. Be good. And...if you absolutely can't, be good to the ones you love."

Shielder's forcefield shimmered and shifted positions. Victoria and Amy on one side, everyone else in a bubble on the other.

"We'll see you again! I love you!" called Brandish. She shifted into her energy form.

Dragon moved forward and gripped the heroes in a single smooth movement. Lady Photon in her left hand, Shielder and Brandish's energy form in her right. Jets of flame erupted from the engines on her back and she shot into the air, heading north in the direction of the blockade.

Victoria moved to Amy's side and put her arm around her shoulders. The sisters watched their family go, until they were out of sight.


	11. Victoria 7

1:14 PM

Victoria watched the bright spark in the sky disappear into the distance. The last she would see of her family for years, maybe the last she would see of them forever. If the world never came to its senses and let them out of quarantine.

A pair of screams came from the vicinity of Downtown, jolting her from her ruminations. The Simurgh's familiar scream sent directly into her mind, hitting a crescedo that made her wince and her eyes water. Then a rumble shook the earth and a second scream followed. A raw cry ripping through the air like a hundred beasts crying out in unision. Primal, bestial, just human enough to be painful in its _wrongness_.

The Simurgh was out of sight, but they could follow the progress of the fight from the trail of explosions on the ground and the swarm of flying capes in the air. The swarm of flyers seemed larger than before - the work of the clone-making monster Mom had told them about. Echidna. Now that Victoria knew what to look for, she saw that the air over Downtown was filled with a thicket of beams like Laserdream's, glowing with all the colors of the rainbow. The monster must have made nearly twenty of clones of Laserdream alone, plus more than twice as many other flyers, and who knew how many capes on the ground. Going anywhere near that mess would be suicide.

Amy shifted at her side. Looked in the direction of the battle, then looked back into the sky where their family had been taken away. "I...Mom, she...they...they're gone and..."

Victoria squeezed her shoulder. "I know. I..." She found herself at a loss for words. She shook her head. "We can't deal with this. Not now. Let's just get out of here, Amy. Find somewhere safe, and then we can..."

Amy took a deep breath, as though to steady herself. "Right. Okay. Somewhere away from _there_. Um. We can't go outside..." She looked back into the sky.

"Yeah. The PRT won't let us near the blockade. Probably shoot us if they see us."

"Um. We can go to the beach, maybe. Do they set up a blockade on the water? Shit. I don't remember the briefings."

"Good idea." said Victoria. "Wait, if there are runaway clones like that thing we killed, they're probably trying to fly out of the city over the bay-"

A pair of chirping sounds from the ground caught her attention. The special smartphones that Dragon had left, the ones with the threat trackers. The screens were displaying a message, "waiting for user input."

Victoria picked up one of the phones, held it loosely in the palm of her good hand and pressed the screen with her thumb. The screen lit up and showed a wireframe map of the city, with glowing dots marking the threats.

There were two bright red dots over Downtown. _Simurgh. Echidna._ The S-class threats, the only ones on the map with names attached. The dots were moving around Downtown in fits and starts, moving precisely in unison, one on top of the other. She had never heard of two S-class threats fighting each other, outside of an exercise where they were asked to brainstorm ideas for nightmare scenarios. The Slaughterhouse Nine invading Ellisburg, or Leviathan attacking the Sleeper. The predicted outcomes hadn't been encouraging.

There were more than a hundred other dots around the city. Individual clones being tracked by surveillance systems. They were orange, green, or blue, marking their level of threat. Some of them were small, sharp dots, especially the ones in the vicinity of the S-class fight, but others were larger, half-transparent circles denoting that the tracker didn't know their precise location.

And _everything_ on the map, the whole city, was colored in at least a light shade of blue. The threat that death would come at at any moment, anywhere in the city, without a moment of warning.

Victoria shivered and moved close to Amy, who was fiddling with her own phone, and surveyed the streets in all directions. The area around them was nearly empty, devoid of immediate threats or of anything else. It was part of the Docks that was closer to the shoreline than to any of the major highways, and must have been deserted in minutes as the civilians fled for the exits.

The fastest way to get away from the threats would be by air. But a message from Dragon at the bottom of the screen warned against it. _"Stay low when flying. Trickster clones teleport capes into Echidna on sight."_ Victoria scowled. The tophat wearing asshole from the Travellers. She and Amy must have been lucky in their own brief fight with the clone, to have escaped without being teleported away. Dragon had been flying low, too, practically hugging the ground as she evacuated their family.

The area with the fewest threats was the white border on the edges of the map, the blockade the military was setting up around the city. But...the border itself was a threat to _them_. There would be capes and soldiers ringing the perimeter, with Dragon in charge of communications. If they went near the blockade they probably would be shot on sight.

Victoria studied the map, looked for a safe haven where she and her sister could survive the day, and...

That was when she saw it.

The lines and the dots on the screen began moving, jittering, until they were unreadable. Her hand was _shaking_, fingers clutching the device with a tight, convulsive grip. The coldness she had felt in battle returned to grip her mind. But it was different this time. Cold and _fierce_. Clarity of purpose without the blessed relief from emotion, from fear, from panic, from _rage_ at what the world had done to them.

It was laid out here in front of her, plain as day in lines and colors. The threats. The enemies. The enemies were _everywhere_. Every dot. Every line. Every color. Everything on the map, everything in the city, everything everywhere, they were all enemies who would shoot on sight, fight them to the death, kill or be killed, they all had to die, all of them except, except...

Something clicked in her mind. A memory - no, a flood of memories. The memories that had risen before her eyes in the last hour, each so vivid that it had felt like she was living them a second time. At the time she had thought the memories were a stroke of good fortune, insights recalled to guide her to save herself and Amy from the disaster.

No. It wasn't natural. It wasn't normal. It must have been the Simurgh. Screwing with her, bringing up shit from her past at the worst possible times, trying to turn her into a monster, a murderer, and convince her it was her own idea. Worst of all, trying to turn her into a traitor to her family. Trying to make her hate her own mother so much she would kill her with a smile on her face!

Now she realized she hadn't seen the truth behind the memories, had been interpreting them backwards all along. She had thought they were telling her that Mom was a failure of a mother. The truth was that...

* * *

"Daddy needs the both of us to cheer him up. He loves you more than anything else in the world, you know. You can help me make him smile, okay, sweetie? Besides, I can't leave you alone at school on a Friday night-"

"Then why are you leaving sis alone at school? I'm not leaving her. I _promised_ her I'd come and see the Pirates of Penzance! And we'll sit next to each other in the front row, and-"

"Victoria, that's enough. It's her play so she can stay. Amy will be perfectly fine. The theatre teacher will be right there and our family gets special treatment from school security. Now come here."

"No. You're being mean to sis. I promised, and I won't let you make me break my promise, and you're supposed to come to the play too, like you said you would, and-"

"Don't take that tone with me. And stop 'defending' Amy as you're so fond of. It's tiresome. She's not under attack. I'm being perfectly fair-"

* * *

Mom had been doing the best she could!

She had too many responsibilities, too many people depending on her. Her work as a lawyer. Her work as a superhero. Her work as a wife, taking care of Dad when his depression got so bad he couldn't take care of himself. There was so little time left for her work as a _mother_. An impossible situation.

What the hell had she been expecting Mom to do? Give up her work in the courts, upholding liberty and justice for all? Give up her work as a hero, taking down the supervillains who the courts couldn't handle? Give up on Dad, when it was only her persistence over years that had brought him back from the depths and made him functional again, made him keep up his career as a superhero, so he could crack a smile when he saw his daughters make the front page of the newspaper for following in his footsteps?

Something had to give. And when Mom had given into the pressure...

* * *

Mom ripped out the page from Amelia's coloring book and threw it in the trash.

Amelia drew back, shocked, then chased after her. "Carol no! Give it back!"

"Amelia. You could have colored in the superheroes, or drawn anything else you liked, but you decided to draw people _dying_. Don't you dare make such a morbid thing again."

"No, he's alive! Everyone has a skeleton. It's anatomy. It's what doctors do. Don't you like doctors?"

"I don't want to hear it. You're six years old, Amelia. Do you know who else draws morbid things when they're six? Villains. That's what Bad Guys do. They make sick drawings when they're small, and then they make sick things happen in reality when they're big. I won't have you doing that in my house. I forbid it!"

* * *

It wasn't her fault! Mom hadn't been able to help herself!

Mom and Dad and their team had been the ones to take down Marquis. The ferocious bone-manipulator who struck fear into the city and won fights against entire teams of capes. When Mom had told them the story her voice had been thick with emotion, even after the passage of years. A desperate fight they only won because Marquis _let_ them win, because his twisted code of honor forced him to surrender rather than take a woman's life. The bastard's smug, self-satisfied smile even in defeat. Mocking the idea of heroism. Seeing his surrender as proof that the fate of the world rested not on ideals of justice, but on the arbitrary whims of the villains with the sickest powers.

Then Mom and Dad found Amelia. His six year old daughter. Who knew nothing of the man's crimes, who would almost certainly grow up to have dangerous powers, who if her identity was made public would certainly be killed by Marquis' vengeful rivals or forced into the gangs to serve as an enforcer.

_Of course_ Mom and Dad had never wanted anything to do with Amy. Who could possibly want that responsibility? It would have been so easy for them to wash their hands of the villain's mess and abandon Amy to her fate.

But Mom and Dad hadn't taken the easy way out. They had taken the hardest way, the way that was toughest for them but was best for the little girl they didn't even know. They took Amy into their family. Gave her their love. Raised her to be a hero. And they had _truly_ loved her. Mom's last gift to them had proved it beyond any doubt.

And _of course_ there had been bad times. Too many times when Mom snapped at Amy for no reason, held her to a double standard, treated her like she was worth less than her genetic family. But that wasn't Mom. It was _Marquis_, the villain, reaching out from his cell in the Birdcage to poison her relationship with her family. He had planted that fear in the back of Mom's mind, made it so that she could never look at her beloved daughter Amy without seeing the sick bastard's grinning face.

* * *

Brandish returned her gaze to Amy, to Victoria. "Do us proud. Be good. And...if you absolutely can't, be good to the ones you love."

* * *

Now Victoria understood the truth her memories had been showing her, if only she could have seen it then. The truth that Mom had been trying to tell her with her last words, with her last actions.

_Do good, but do good for your family first_. Her sister and parents and aunt and uncle and cousins were good people. Heroes in heart and soul. If they were left on to their own devices they never would have suffered hardship, never would done anything even the slightest bit wrong.

Their goodness had only ever been tarnished by the poison from the enemies outside. The stress from a world where there were four villains for every hero. A world where even the _heroes_ were under the thumb of the Protectorate, a heartless political machine with no accountability to the public. A world where even the good-hearted heroes were underappreciated, so often feared for their power instead of respected for their good deeds. Where having your name and face known to the public meant you were at constant risk of being murdered, like her uncle's wife Fleur.

Her family had made it work for years, somehow. Stuck together and built their own island of light in the darkness. They had made their own humble, under-funded team based on better principles than the poisoned world around them, simply because that was _right_. Lived a good life and did good deeds. And when the poison from the world seeped too deep into their systems...they had been too _good_ to take out their fears and frustrations on the innocents of the world. So they had taken them out on each other. Let their family suffer and their love become tarnished, for the sake of saving others from greater pain.

But today the enemies had become jealous of their family's love and used all of their power to steal it away. Crushed their humble dreams and ruined their lives. Killed Crystal, taken the rest of their family hostage, forced them to abandon her and Amy in this quarantined hellhole. Mom and Sarah and Eric...because of their labor of love today, protecting her and Amy with their lives, they would never be trusted again in the outside world. Dad and Neil would be left alone for months, adrift, Dad with his depression and only the enemy scum to turn to for support. And the enemies were _still going at it_. It was only a matter of time before they struck again.

It was sick. It was wrong. It was _unfair_. No. Unacceptable.

The Simurgh. The cloning monster, Echidna. The clones. Dragon. The Protectorate. The military, the blockade. The villains. They were everywhere. Everywhere in the world. Everywhere in the city. Everywhere around them, coming to kill them, the dots and the lines right here in the palm of her hand, in the palm-

A sharp crunch, a tinkle of shattered glass.

Victoria blinked. She looked at the phone with the threat tracker. She had squeezed it in her hand it like a tube of toothpaste, crushed its casing and cracked the screen. Pieces of shatter-resistant glass fell to the street below. She realized that she was grinding her teeth, every muscle tense, her aura spiking out of control.

Amy was staring at her, an expression of wide-eyed fascination. Victoria ratcheted down her aura, and Amy shifted to a more normal look, her brow wrinkled in concern. "You broke it, Vicky."

Victoria shook the phone. The mangled screen didn't come back on.

"Oops." she said.

Victoria squeezed the device again, feeling a dim pleasure from exerting her strength to the fullest as she crushed it into a ball of scrap. She looked around for a place to get rid of it, saw a pair of trash dumpsters in a nearby alley. But...fuck it. There was no point in worrying about littering, now. She wound up and threw the remains of the phone in the direction of the Simurgh, her super strength carrying it over the roof of a warehouse and out of sight.

Amy watched it go. "Um. Looks like I should hold on to this one."

"Good idea." said Victoria. She flew the short distance to Amy's side, and Amy held out her phone so they could both see the screen.

"It looks bad." said Amy. "Threats everywhere we go. Um, I'm thinking we can try the Boardwalk. There aren't as many-"

Victoria snatched the phone from Amy's hands and threw it down the street, as hard as she could. It flew a quarter mile in the air before it broke through the high window of a warehouse with a satisfying crash.

Amy gaped at her. "What...what the hell, Vicky? We needed that!"

"I'm not going to let them hurt you again." said Victoria firmly.

"What? _Them?_ You mean...Dragon? The PRT? Vicky, she gave us that to _save_ us!"

"Yeah, them. The enemies. The ones who tried to kill you and stole Mom and our family away. They said they'd kill us on sight. You don't take favors from villains like that. They threw us away so we're damn well going to throw them away too!"

Amy stared at her. Turned and looked into the distance, at the battle with the Simurgh, then turned back to Victoria. She spoke slowly, carefully. As though she was trying to coax a jumper to step away from the edge of a roof. "Victoria. Vicky. Sis. Please listen to me. You're not thinking straight. Dragon is a hero. She was right to put us in here. She was being merciful, she should've just-"

"No."

"We've been _exposed_, Vicky. We've been exposed to the Simurgh. Don't you understand what that means? It's over for us."

"_No._"

"Yes!" Amy gave up her pretense of calm. "It's the Simurgh, you know what she does to heroes! What she did to Sphere. They said he was the best hope of ending world hunger and now he's a serial killer. Mutilated himself into a fucking killer cyborg! God. They say the same things about me. The miracle healer, the _Panacea_. Waiting until I get out of school and they can make me work full time, and now-"

"Amy, you're not going to turn yourself into a killer cyborg."

"Of course not! It doesn't have to be that. With my power it could be anything! Or, or if that monster gets me and makes one of those, those clones, I-" Amy snapped her eyes shut and shuddered, moaned under her breath. When she opened her eyes they were wide, wilder. "I can still hear her! She's here, in my head, and she's showing me things, _ugly_ things she wants me to do, to hurt people, and hurt _you_, and..."

Victoria put her hand on Amy's chin and forced her to look up, to look her in the eyes. "So you're telling me you think you're better off dead. Is that what you're going to do? Kill yourself and leave me alone?"

"I, I..."

"No." said Victoria. She tried to say it gently but it came out firm and cold. An absolute pronouncement. "You are not allowed to kill yourself, Amy. You are not allowed to dishonor the sacrifices your family made to save you. You're better than that." Victoria leaned closer and turned up her aura. "Trust me. I love you. I know you better than anyone. You're the most moral person I know. You've never done anything wrong, and you're not _going_ to do anything wrong. You're just stressed out and you're not thinking straight. But that's okay. We're going to make it through this."

"I, I, then..." Amy stammered. Then she snapped out of her trance and struggled, tried to move her head out of Victoria's firm grip. "Let go and cut out the aura! You're hurting me! You're not thinking straight either! If you want us to get through this we have to survive the day. We needed those-"

A piercing whistle in the air. Victoria snapped her head up in time to see two glowing streaks fall from the sky and _detonate_, an earthshaking roar she felt in her bones. One impact out of sight behind the warehouses, a second down the street. Each one was a series of repeated explosions, more than a dozen on top of each other in quick succession, like chains of fireworks going off in a fourth of July display. Chunks of the buildings they hit were thrown in all directions, white-hot fragments spinning hundreds of feet into the air.

Victoria reverted to her instincts. She wrapped her arms around Amy and pulled them into the air, hovering ten feet above ground level, putting her body between Amy and the explosions and searching for the source of the attack. They had seemed to come from directly above, but-

Two clusters of glowing red sparks descended from the sky, one above each of the blast sites. Like beehives hovering fifty feet above ground, their surfaces lined with dozens of glowing soldiers lined up in rows and columns. The red sparks flashed into motion, one by one, leaving trails of light behind them as they struck targets on the ground below.

Victoria stared at the spectacle. Time seemed to slow down, the devastation coming into focus with crystal clarity. She watched a fragment of a metal railing spin through the air, turning end over end, glowing red with heat from the explosion that had propelled it into the sky.

_The blast sites._ The blasts where where she had thrown the phones. The phones they had been given by Dragon, 'modified for quarantine' by the heartless woman who wanted to kill them. Chains of explosions, designed to get past her forcefield. And now a second attack as insurance, to finish the job.

Victoria watched one red spark fly and strike the spinning piece of metal, ripping it apart into white-hot melted fragments. A second spark flew at a moving target on the ground. A stray cat that had been startled by the commotion and was scurrying across the street, intercepted and blasted apart into burning bits of flesh.

The sparks were hunting down any signs of life. Seeking motion, or heat, or something more subtle the genius Tinker had devised. And she had just flown herself and her sister into the air. A perfect target.

The next red spark in the nearest cluster began to move, aimed directly toward her. Then another, then two more-

Victoria fled. The sparks were too fast. She wouldn't be able to outfly them. Her only chance was to stay near the ground and find cover, but she had less than a second to find it.

_The alley_. She flew. There were trash dumpsters, the heavy metal industrial kind with closed tops that might be able to take a hit, or she could get into the buildings by ripping open side doors or punching through the walls, and hope the sparks couldn't turn corners to follow her-

One spark struck her in the back, shorted out her forcefield. She felt a wave of heat behind her, hoped that her body had shielded Amy from the worst of the heat.

Two more sparks coming, half a second behind it. Victoria shifted Amy in her arms, spun in the air to face the attacks, and kicked the nearest dumpster into the air in their path. The sparks struck it and detonated, the force blasting the dumpster back in her direction at high speed, coming inches away from hitting her before it crashed into the wall of the alley.

The fourth spark came with less than a second to react. Victoria used what was left of her right arm to hold Amy against her chest while she used her left hand to fling open the top of the second dumpster, and threw them both inside. In the last instant before the impact she realized that Amy was screaming, clamped her hand over her mouth to cut off the sound the sparks could use to track them, wrapping her right arm around the back of Amy's head and neck to protect her.

The impact _hurt_. An explosion accelerated the dumpster from zero to forty miles an hour in an instant, and Victoria felt something snap in her back as the metal wall smashed into her. A moment later her forcefield came back up in time to absorb a second impact, as the dumpster decelerated from forty to zero as it slammed into a wall.

Victoria held Amy tight, eyes shut, waiting for the next impact to come that would cripple or kill them.

...but none came. She heard a series of explosions in a regular rhythm, several per second, the remaining red sparks expending themselves on all the targets they could find. Then silence. Only the crackling roar of the fires from the explosions and the familiar song of the Simurgh.

Victoria let out a breath. She felt the warmth of Amy's body, the soft rise and fall of her breathing, the moisture of Amy's breath against her hand. Alive. They were alive.

Victoria tried to get to her feet, only to find that her body below the waist was _gone_. No, not gone. She turned her head and saw that her body was fine, whole, but she couldn't move her legs, couldn't feel any sensations. Something must have broken in her spine. It didn't matter. As soon as she became aware of the problem she felt a trickle of sensations in her lower body, like raindrops landing on her skin. Her sister healing the damage. Mending broken nerves, restoring lost connections.

Amy had been more fortunate. She had been cushioned from the impact by Victoria's efforts and by the discarded junk stuffed in the bottom of the dumpster. A pile of old, torn-up rubber pet toys and a stack of empty jumbo-sized bags of dog food, twenty different flavors. Ridiculous, to imagine someone dumping the trash from a dog pound at a random industrial site in the Docks, but at the moment she couldn't be more grateful.

Victoria moved her hand away from Amy's mouth, careful to keep skin contact so Amy could use her power. She held Amy in her arms until her body felt close to normal again, then gingerly floated them up out of the dumpster, making sure not to touch the side where the metal was red-hot and half-melted from the spark's impact. She flew them to the end the alley and set them down next to the street. She stood, and surveyed the damage.

Two great plumes of smoke rising from devastated blast sites a block wide. Tens of scorched craters littering the street and nearby buildings.

Victoria clenched her jaw, turned back to her sister. "Did you see what that was, Amy? Do you get it now?"

Amy took a step backward. Then her legs seemed to give out under her and she slumped with her back against the wall of the building, her mouth hanging open. "Oh God. That was..."

"Those ungrateful fucking assholes! They, they just..._fuck_!" Victoria shook her head sharply. She spun and turned back to the plumes of smoke. "Fucking Dragon. She _lied_ to us! Said she'd save us then tried to kill us! She had, God, she had _ready made_ fake phones to lie to people and blow them to bits! And we trusted her!"

Victoria clenched her fist, then half-ran half-flew to the nearest wall and punched as hard as she could, sending her hand deep into the wall. Then she gripped and pulled back, tearing out a chunk of the building's supports and sending shattered bricks raining down around her.

"And now Mom and everyone else are stuck with _them_! In maximum-security containment!" Victoria paced, her jaw tense, everything tense, unable to contain herself. "You know what it's like in there, right? Surrounded by the enemies, under their control every second of the day, having to ask their permission to take a shit! Having to suck up to them and ask if they'll pretty please let them out this month, all the while thinking those lying scum did us a _favor_! Fuck!"

Victoria punched the wall again, using her flight to add force to the blow. More shattered bricks, a gaping hole opened in the wall. She flew to the dumpster that had sheltered them and gave it a single sharp kick. It flew for two blocks before it smashed through the side of a building.

"I am going to make them suffer for this. Fuck it. Never should have trusted them in the first place. Traitors. They wanted to kill you. Came right out and said they were our enemies. 'Make a show of good will for the PRT', fuck it!"

She needed to _break_ something. She cast about, eyes moving wildly, searching for a target-

Then she caught sight of her sister.

Amy was slumped over, head bent forward and buried in her hands. Collapsed.

Victoria's anger drained away in a rush, leaving only a cold feeling in her gut. She flew to Amy's side, sat next to her against the wall.

"Hey. Hey, Amy. It's okay. I won't let them hurt you. I'm here for you. You're safe now. We're safe, for a little while."

"You saved me." said Amy.

"Yeah. Seems like that's my full time job, now." said Victoria. A small smile quirked the corner of her lips, in spite of everything. "I said you couldn't trust Dragon, and this is proof, right? So you listen to me. Don't believe a word that heartless bitch said about you."

"You were right. You saved me. Again. Because I fucked up. Again." Amy looked up at Victoria, eyes peeking out from under her hands. Then looked down again, unable to meet her eyes. "Because I fucked up again and I can't do anything right."

Oh no.

"Hey, no. Don't say that. This is just a...a bad day. A really shitty day. You can't let it get to you. You're allowed to have a bad day during an Endbringer attack."

Victoria touched Amy's arm, felt the warmth of her skin. She was so soft, so vulnerable. Not only emotionally, now, but physically. They were out in the open, and the enemies were everywhere.

"You had a good idea, before. Let's go to the beach, or the Boardwalk. Find a place to hide. Find something to eat. God, that was only an hour ago. We never got to finish lunch."

Victoria stood, tapped Amy on the shoulder. But Amy didn't move a muscle, didn't raise her head from her hands.

"I fucked up so much today, Vicky. Enough to last a lifetime and I can't _fix_ it. The Simurgh was doing something to me, showing me visions, desires, sick shit like my dad must have done. I can see what's going to happen." Her voice broke. "Fucking up like that again and again for the rest of my life, digging myself deeper until I don't know which way is up."

"No, Amy, no. It's just one bad day. It'll look better tomorrow."

"I fucked up healing you. Because I never practiced brains. I always _knew_ I would need it someday. Everyone knew it. You and Mom always told me to practice but I didn't because I was _stupid_. I lied to everyone, called myself a hero when I had the power to save people and let them die instead. And...and it still would have been okay but I took too long. My stupid perfection complex. Wasted so much time trying to fix you perfect until we didn't have any time left to leave."

Victoria put her arm around Amy's shoulder and held her close. Amy didn't respond. She was shaking, her voice unsteady. Sometimes harsh, hateful, venomous, other times soft and wavering, on the edge of breaking.

"Then that clone. I _knew_ something was wrong, her brain was screwed up beyond belief. So what did I do? I straight out told her my suspicions like an idiot, asked her consent, gave her a chance to hurt us. And then I let her...let her get to me with her...stupid _lies_. Went limp and whimpering in your arms like a useless piece of meat. So now you have blood on your hands. You had to kill her when you thought she was _Mom_. I can't believe I did that to you. I'm such a shitty sister."

"No. You're a good sister. It's not your fault."

"And then...and then! I trusted the big name heroes like an idiot when I knew the regs and I knew they wanted to kill us! It's so obvious, I was so stupid. Hanging on to the 'gift' from the genius fucking weapons inventor! How stupid can I possibly be? As if I _wanted_ to get you killed!

Amy pressed her face against her hands, let out a low moan. "All my stupid rules. Don't do brains, get consent before I heal, trust the big-name heroes. They were all useless in the end. Worse than useless. They got us stuck in here, almost killed, and now we're _worse_ than dead-"

"Amy, no-"

"And you're stuck here with me, now, and...and I can't believe it. I can't fathom why you're staying with me. How can you possibly love such a useless human being? You're having to talk to me in baby words and tell me the stupidest shit even a toddler should understand. 'Don't trust the people who just tried to kill you.' 'Don't kill yourself.' It's unbelievable. Like I'm programmed to do the exact stupidest thing in every situation. Every time I do the one thing that will hurt you the most. I'm such a shitty sister for you, Vicky. Such a shitty human being."

"No! Amy, no, please. Don't you dare say that." Victoria tried to force her face to show confidence, a smile, but it was impossible. Seeing her sister like this was a punch to the gut. She felt tears coming to her eyes, wiped them away. "It's not your fault. None of this was ever your fault, okay? It's all their fault. _Them_. The Simurgh, the Echidna, the PRT, the enemies. They dumped this impossible shit on you, of course it turned out shitty, but that's all on them, understand? You didn't do _anything_ wrong."

"I can feel it. I'm...I'm going to do something dumb and get myself killed. Or get you killed. And then I'll hate myself forever. Or I'll do something so bad that makes you hate me, become a villain and you have to hunt me down and you'll-"

"No, Amy."

"I can feel it."

"No."

"I can't do this anymore." Amy let her hands drop to her sides, stared at the ground. "I can't trust myself. Can't trust my rules. Can't even trust my own mind, my own thoughts. I'm lost, Vicky."

The words hung in the air.

Victoria searched for a reply. For the words that would fix her broken sister. But she wasn't eloquent, the way Amy could be. The only words that came to her were platitudes, simple denials. 'It's okay.' 'It's not your fault.' 'You're a good person.' The same words she'd told her sister already, the words her sister couldn't find it in her heart to believe.

So she spoke the only words she could. The words her sister would always believe, the words that were engraved on their soul, truer than anything else in the world.

"I love you, Amy. I'm here for you."

Amy didn't respond. She was still, limp in her arms. Victoria leaned into her, hugged her tighter. "I love you. I love you. Come back to me. I need you. Let me help you."

Amy finally stirred. The slightest of motions, shifting in place. Then she looked up and her eyes were wide, so wide.

"Will you take care of me?" said Amy. "Tell me what to do? What to think? Until I can figure out what's right and wrong again?"

Her face was so open and vulnerable. No thoughts or guile behind her eyes. Only an emptiness that wanted to be filled.

Every feeling in Victoria's heart told her to tell her 'no'. It wasn't supposed to be like this. They were meant to be a _pair_, two parts to a whole. Amy was her pillar of support, the saintly one, the moral guardian who brought her back when her high-flying passions took her too far. Victoria _needed_ that part of her. She wasn't complete without her.

Victoria wanted so badly to tell Amy that everything would be okay in the morning, the same as it ever was. That she still believed in Amy, that she could count on her one hundred percent, even now.

Amy spoke softly. "Please. Please. I...I trust you, Vicky."

Victoria saw the look on her face, and...she couldn't say 'no' to her. Her sister needed her. She was _broken_. Victoria was the only one who could fix her and put her right again.

It wouldn't be easy. It would be one-sided, and Victoria had never been one to hold back her strength. She would have to treat Amy like fragile glass, be careful not to push her too far, not to guide her astray. Draw upon her memories of their relationship to teach her sister how to be _Amy_ again, to fill her up until she was whole again.

Victoria wiped a tear from her eye and forced her face into a smile. "Yeah. Of course. I'll be your guide. For anything you need, for however long you need me."

On an impulse she leaned forward and kissed Amy on the forehead, like Mom had done in her last moments of freedom.

"I promise. For better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do us part."


	12. Victoria 8

1:20 PM

Victoria released her sister from her hug and rose to her feet, gesturing for her to follow. "It's time for us to go. Let's find somewhere to hide until this all blows over. Get something to eat, somewhere to sleep. It'll...it'll all look better in the morning."

Amy didn't respond. Still shell shocked.

Victoria didn't feel anything either. She didn't even believe the words she was saying. Her sister had been _broken_ by the enemies, and her own heart felt like it had been ripped out of her chest. The song of the Simurgh buzzed in the back of her mind, and she knew the Endbringer wasn't done trying to break their family apart. But she couldn't give up. Amy was counting on her. Until Amy got better, it was up to her to take care of the two of them. Had to keep going, had to keep their spirits up. Had to hope that if they believed in a happy ending hard enough, it would come true.

Victoria kneeled and cupped Amy's chin in her hand, made her meet her eyes. "Sis, come on. Get up. I'll take care of you, I'll lead you, but you have to follow."

Amy stirred and climbed to her feet. Her movements were stiff, mechanical, and her gaze was dull. Her eyes passed over the wrecked warehouses around them, the crater-strewn streets, the S-class battles in the distance, as though there was nothing there but empty air. She fixed her eyes on Victoria as if there was nothing else in the world.

Victoria forced herself to smile. "You had a good idea before. I'll take us out to the bay, so we can fly from enemies on the ground. Come here, I'll carry you."

Amy nodded, and let Victoria hoist her into her arms in a bridal carry, tilted to one side to compensate for Victoria's missing right hand. Victoria took off and flew to the coastline at a cautious thirty miles an hour, staying below roof level to avoid being spotted from the distance.

As she flew Victoria spotted civilians on the streets, scattered here and there, then increasing in number as they approached the coastline. Families, carrying what they could of their possessions on their backs, some carrying children in their arms. One family of five was throwing bricks to break into a warehouse, searching for shelter to hide from the disaster. Many of the families were broken in one way or another, the way they held themselves betraying a recent loss. A man with an infant in a carry bag on his chest, an eight year old girl following at his heels. A young woman with a bruised and bloodied arm, struggling to push an elderly woman in a wheelchair. A boy and a girl, no older than ten, with school backpacks on their backs and leading a dog by the leash.

Other men and women were alone. Some rushing in a single direction with frantic haste, others wandering the streets as though they were lost. Still others moved in groups, brought together by ties of friendship or gang loyalty. Six twenty-somethings carrying improvised weapons, four teenagers in E88 regalia. Some of the groups moved more slowly, less cohesively, and eyed each other warily. Strangers who had come together for mutual protection.

As she flew past the civilians turned to stare or cried out in alarm. Her bloodstains must have been terrifying enough, and anyone who knew about the clones probably thought she was one of them. Her aura would only add to the effect. She made an effort to suppress her aura. If any clones were lurking here, the shouts from could call their attention.

The worst were the civilians who _recognized_ her, who called out to her for help.

"Glory Girl! Over here, please help! My husband-"

"Hey, hey! Need help-"

"Glory Girl! Panacea! Wait-"

"Glory-"

Victoria accelerated, putting them behind her as fast as she could, and tried to block out the shame she felt inside. They were innocents. Abandoned by the world, trapped inside the city by the enemies, just like her and Amy. Her instincts as a hero cried out for her to help. But she clamped down on those feelings hard and forced herself to keep going. Her first priority was Amy, and surviving the day. The enemies could attack at any time. Couldn't slow down until they found a safe place to hide.

Besides, anyone left in the city this long had probably been exposed to the Simurgh for far longer than was healthy. She and Amy had figured out the Simurgh's game, clued into the true meaning of the visions and caught the traps the Endbringer had set for them, but they couldn't trust the civilians to have done the same. She had no way to know who were good-hearted people like her and Amy, and who were the Simurgh's sleeper agents, the enemies lurking among them.

As she drew near to the coastline she realized that the bay was hidden from view by a massive wall of mist. The mist was coming from some kind of tinker devices studding the streets along the bay. A PRT tactic to stop the Trickster clones from teleporting people out of the city?

A voice was coming from the tinker devices on the streets, a tinny voice that seemed to echo as it came from directions at once along the coastline. _"The city is under quarantine. Do not attempt to leave. Wait for PRT advisories. The city is under quarantine. Do not attempt to leave..."_

When she passed through the mist she saw the reason why, and halted her flight.

The military had blockaded the bay.

The ships in the harbors were shattered, smoking wrecks, and floating debris from sunken ships was scattered across the bay. In the distance, dotting the horizon as far as she could see in all directions, were dark gray military ships with cannons aimed at the city.

A man in an electric blue bodysuit hovered above the boats, occasionally flaring with energy like a blue spark of light in the sky. _Legend._ Leader of the Protectorate. The strongest flying artillery cape in the world, more powerful than all the capes in the New Wave combined.

"Damn. They thought of everything." said Victoria. "Think we can get past them, Amy?"

Amy blinked at the mention of her name. She had been staring at her hands in her lap, oblivious to the world. Amy looked at the boats and the figure in the distance, but didn't give a response.

On the other side of the bay two shapes flew out of the mist at high speed and headed for the ocean. Victoria could barely make them out at this distance, but she could already tell what they were. One of them was surrounded by a flickering magenta shield of light. Laserdream's forcefield. A clone of Crystal. The other was less like a human than a conglomeration of shining strands of magenta light, coiling and uncoiling themselves around each other in the vague shape of a woman. Another clone, of Crystal, one with a different power? A breaker form?

The instant the clones left the mist, Legend fired a blue laser directly in front of them, sending a massive spout of superheated water into the air. A warning shot.

The clones went on the attack, the first clone firing at him with a barrage of red lasers, the second flying forward at lightning speed to trap him in its glowing coils.

Legend returned fire, simply annihilating the first clone with a wide-angle laser blast, then flitting from place to place to avoid the breaker clone, moving so fast he seemed to teleport. Each time he moved he blasted at the clone with beams that created different effects, conjuring fire, then ice, then some kind of air vibration that let out a sonic boom. He found an effect that frayed the living coils of energy and turned it on full blast, methodically ripping away the coils of the clone's body until it was entirely torn apart. The entire process took less than twenty seconds.

"Shit. Not getting out that way." muttered Victoria.

Amy let out a soft, wordless sound and held Victoria's shoulder in a tight grip. Victoria winced. Her brave sister, reduced to whimpering like a frightened animal.

"We're hiding, then. It's okay, Amy. I won't let that happen to us."

Victoria flew them through the mist back into the city, then cast about, looking for a place to hide. Somewhere with food and water, where they would escape notice, where they could defend themselves in case of attack.

An Endbringer shelter would be a good bet. It would have all of the above, and the shelters would probably be deserted. Anyone who went into a shelter during a Simurgh attack was sentencing themselves to a lifetime of quarantine. The problem was that the shelters were meant for protection against catastrophes. Earthquakes, radidation, tidal waves. Not malevolent clones who could simply walk in through the doors. And Victoria didn't like the idea of being trapped in a box that her super strength couldn't punch through. Too easy to get boxed in by the enemies without a way to escape.

Her eyes lit on a building she recognized, two blocks from the shore. There, that was the hideout they needed. It was a building that leased each floor to a different business. The first floor was a mid-priced Indian restaurant, a place where they could get food and basic necessities to last for days. The second floor was a shop with a distinctive sign. Not anything they could use for survival, but a place that might bring a hint of light back to her sister's eyes.

Victoria set them down in front of the first floor entrance and walked in the door, Amy trailing behind her like a shadow. The restaurant was an eerie scene. It was empty, deserted in the middle of the lunchtime buffet, tables abandoned with half-eaten meals on the plates. The song of the Simurgh was quieter here, farther away from the battle, and it gave the scene a sense of stillness and tranquility.

There was a kind of...freedom, here. A faint sense of exhileration, at the bottom of her physical and mental exhaustion. She and Amy had lost everything in their old life. Now they were starting a new life, fresh, open-ended, with only each other and the necessities of life they could find.

It was romantic, in a way. Just the two of them. In a city with no law, no order, where everyone else was trying to flee the city. She and her sister had the run of the place. They could go anywhere and do anything, choose any place they liked to be their new home, their castle.

Victoria turned to Amy and gave an elaborate bow, gesturing to the buffet. "After you, my dear Amy." she said.

Amy managed a thin smile. "Thanks." She took a plate and started spooning out food.

Hmm. No 'Thank you, my dearest Victoria'. And Amy's motions were still stiff, mechanical, as if her mind was someplace else. But Amy was in a bad way. She'd have to take what she could get.

Victoria moved to join Amy at the buffet, then felt the sticky texture of dried blood on her fingers. Right. She had almost forgotten. "Washing my hands. Back in a sec."

Thankfully the restaurant still had running water.

Victoria returned to the dining area and picked up a plate. She and gestured with her free arm. "Ames, can you get me the chicken vindaloo? The paneer is pretty good here too. Actually has a flavor, unlike the cheap-o joint on Lord's Street."

Amy nodded, set her own plate on a side table and started spooning food from the buffet onto Victoria's. Victoria studied her sister carefully.

"Hey, uh, Amy. You _do_ realize why I asked you to help get me food, don't you?"

Amy blinked. "Um?"

Victoria waved the stump of her right arm. "Think you can regrow my hand while we're here?"

Amy's face fell. "Oh. _Oh._ Right. I, I'm sorry. You've been carrying me this whole time without your hand, and I completely forgot. I took you for granted. I should have-"

"Whoa, I'm stopping you right there. You're forgiven. It's fine." Victoria pursed her lips. "Let's start again. Amy. Think you can regrow my hand while we're here?"

"Yes. Yes of course." Amy looked around the room. "It's faster if I use live biomass. The hospital keeps a colony of fungus for me in the basement with the right mix of raw material. Here..."

"I remember. Your medical mushrooms." Victoria looked to one of the decorative plants that adorned the room. "Can you use these?"

Amy touched one. "No. They're fake. Most plants don't have the right materials, anyway. Um, I could use live animals. Dogs or cats, or rats, or bugs, or..."

"Ick. No pets, please. Let's eat first. Healing second." said Victoria.

A muffled thump, an explosion in the distance.

"But hurry." she added.

Victoria was surprised at how hungry she was. She hadn't had lunch, and she had been fighting for their lives on an empty stomach. Amy was much the same. They wolfed down their food plus a second serving in five minutes flat.

As Victoria finished off a generous helping of rice pudding - normally she would save her indulgences for higher quality desserts, but she couldn't bring herself to care about calories at the moment - she heard a faint rustling coming from the floor behind her. She spun to face the threat, only to see a rat scurrying across the floor and out of sight into the kitchen. Another rat rushed along the wall and hid behind a table leg.

"Tch. Disgusting. Remind me never to eat here again." said Victoria.

"Um. It's not the restaurant." said Amy. "I've been using the bacteria on my skin to make rat pheromones. Like a female rat in heat."

Amy kneeled and put out her hand. After a few seconds the nearest rat peeked out from behind the table leg and cautiously approached, a series of skittering advances and retreats. When it came close, it whisked and sniffed at her hand. The instant it touched her hand the rat went still, paralyzed. Amy held her hand on the rat for a moment, then let go and stepped back. The second rat scurried from the kitchen and made a beeline for the first rat, eagerly mounting it and then quickly going limp. Two more rats came close behind it, nipping at each other competitively. They mounted the growing pile of rats and fell limp themselves.

"They're coming from the kitchen, Ames. I stand by my complaint."

Victoria watched the spectacle with a morbid fascination. After the pile grew to six rats Amy stepped forward and touched them again. Two more rats that were coming from the kitchen abruptly reversed direction and scurried away. Switching the pheromones from attraction to repulsion. The pile of rats began changing shape under Amy's power. First all of their hair and whiskers fell off, the dead matter falling to the floor, leaving them pink and hairless. Then their bodies began to warp and distort, seeming to turn liquid as they merged into each other and dissolved into a single fleshy mass. After a minute the mass took on the rough shape of a lower arm and hand, with webbing between the fingers.

"Here, give me your arm." said Amy.

Victoria eyed the mass of flesh warily. She had never seen her sister use her power quite like this, and it was frankly disgusting. But she had long ago come to terms with the squicky nature of her sister's power. Victoria knew that she herself was outrageously lucky in that department. She had gotten the power to save lives and look good doing it. Flight, strength, an aura of glory. Her sister's power was even _better_ for saving lives, but she had to do it shut away from the public in hospital emergency rooms, buried up to her elbows in blood and guts.

Victoria admired her sister for that. Amy went through it all stoically, with a stomach of steel that let her eat dinner after healing one of Oni Lee's disembowelling victims, never letting slip more than the slightest hint of envy for her family's more flashy and glorious powers.

So there was no way in hell that Victoria was going to let her discomfort show. Not here and now, when her sister needed her the most.

Victoria put on a wide smile. "That's awesome, Ames. Pests into prosthetics." She didn't hesitate as she kneeled and pressed the stub of her right arm up against the fleshy mass.

Amy touched one hand to Victoria's arm and the other hand to the mass. Victoria watched in fascination as her arm gradually merged with the mass. The mass, her new right arm and hand, took on a more distinctly human shape. The webbing between the fingers dissolved, and the fingers gained knuckles and nails. Victoria felt a series of gentle sensations coming from her new hand, like raindrops pattering on her skin. She experimentally tried to move the hand and the fingers spasmed, jittering in place.

"Don't move it yet. Still hooking up the nerves." said Amy.

"Yes, doctor." said Victoria.

No smile, for that one, but Amy sounded better than before. Her voice clearer, her words sharper. Firmly within her field of expertise.

There was a thought. Victoria had been assuming that they travel alone in the quarantine zone, but now she realized that it would be important for Amy's mental health to let her act in her practiced role as a doctor. Give her patients to treat, lives to save, chances to use her power with clear positive outcomes. The first steps to regaining her confidence in herself.

"Okay, try it now." said Amy.

Victoria flexed her new arm again, and this time it came as second nature. She experimentally made her right hand into a fist, slapped it into her left palm. As strong as the original.

"Good as new. Perfect. You have my eternal thanks, my dearest Amy." said Victoria. She hugged her sister, a full two-armed hug this time. Amy brightened up a shade at that, a hint of color returning to her cheeks.

Victoria smiled. "I brought us here for more than the chicken vindaloo. Did you notice where we are?"

Amy looked around the room. "No."

"This is where we did our window shopping, back when we made our promise."

"Window shopping?" Amy looked at her blankly. She must be really out of it.

"Here, I'll show you."

Victoria led Amy outside, taking care to check for trouble on the streets before leading her to the side of the building and up the stairs. Victoria ushered Amy through the door, then flew around the shop in a circle, finally hovering in the center with a smile and her arms spread wide.

"See? Remember this old place?"

The room was decorated all in white. White curtains on a window with white paneling, an ornate white sofa with decorative pillows in white lace. In the center of the room was a display with precious gems, necklaces, and bracelets, with a centerpiece of artfully arranged flowers. And along the walls were mannequins, all clad in elaborate white dresses.

"Daphne's Vintage Bridal." Victoria smirked. "I know I was a little dumbass back then. You were still reluctant about the public wedding thing, and my idea of convincing you was to drag you here to look at the pretty dresses. I figured you'd like the vintage ones, since you're such a fussy traditionalist at heart - not that I said that to your face, of course - and I was _totally_ right on that count. Good times."

Victoria flew to a mannequin wearing an elaborate lace wedding gown, with a long train trailing across the floor. "What do you think? Does it suit me?"

Amy didn't reply, and Victoria returned to studying the dress. "Mom would approve, I think. Big and bold. She said if we're going to do it, we'd better do it _right_. Besides, Dad said it would look bad for New Wave if we did anything but a _proper_ wedding. With high society invites and fancy catering and such." A pained look crossed her face. "Not that we'll have the chance, now. Think we can find an ordained minister in here? Or one of those secular officiants you like."

Victoria crossed the room to another dress. Less eye-catching but more refined, with an air of sophistication. "This one was your favorite, right? Back then your eyes popped out when Daphne told you the price tags, but that's not exactly a problem anymore. We'll still need to find a tailor, though..."

Amy had gone still and quiet. Not good. Her impromptu shopping trip was having the opposite of the intended effect.

"Hey, don't give me that look." said Victoria. "I'm a supporter of law and order but this isn't _stealing_. Not now. The owners probably skipped town already. They'd probably be glad to hear that their wedding gowns are making a pair of lovebirds happy."

Amy didn't reply. She raised a hand to cover her mouth, eyes wide. Oh fuck. Victoria raised her own hand to her mouth, in shock at what she had done.

"_Fuck._ Sorry Ames. I'm getting carried away, aren't I? I'm, I'm not saying we _have_ to get married right away. I know you asked me to guide you, and I don't want to, you know, force the issue. I promised you I'd wait, and I'll keep my promise. If you still want to wait then that's fine with me. Totally fine! I just kind of assumed, uh, since we're in a bad spot here, well..."

Victoria searched for words, tried to cover it up with a bright smile. "I, I was just thinking. We should make merry while we can, right? Seize the day. We don't know how long we'll survive in here, and we'd really regret it if something happened to us before-" Victoria realized what she was saying and cut herself off. "Oh fuck. Scratch that. We're definitely going to live. _Definitely_. So don't worry about that, Amy. We'll be fine. But, um, what I'm trying to say is, uh, we shouldn't hold back anymore, not now, when, uh..."

Victoria shut up before she could put her foot in her mouth any deeper. God, she was so stupid. She _knew_ her sister was finicky about these things, and her sister had just been _broken_, and they were stuck in a quarantine zone in the middle of a fucking Endbringer attack...and she had thought that she could just fly her sister into a bridal shop and she'd be _magically_ fixed by the _magical_ power of love and she'd be all smiles picking out a dress to wear to the wedding? She was such an idiot!

Amy stared at Victoria. She spoke slowly, her voice wavering. "This is wrong. This is all wrong."

"Fuck. I know. I'm sorry. I fucked up." said Victoria.

"It's...it's not your fault. It's not you. It's me."

"What? No, Amy, no. It was my idea. I was a dumbass. Here, let's just go. We'll hide somewhere else."

Amy wasn't listening. She sat down on the couch and wrung her hands, then looked up at Victoria. "I need your help. Something went wrong, and I, I...please. I need you to tell me what to do."

Victoria sat beside Amy and took her hands into her own. She wanted to reassure her sister, tell her that everything was fine, tell her that whatever she was thinking of wasn't her fault. But she saw the expression on her face and the words died in her throat.

Victoria swallowed. "Of course. Anything."

"I'm trying to think of what Mom told us." said Amy. "Mom said if something goes wrong we shouldn't hide it. Shouldn't lie to hide dirty deeds."

"Yeah. That's right. Shine the light of truth."

"But...but what if admitting it will just hurt people more? What if you're not hiding it because of selfishness, you _wish_ you could tell the truth and get it off your chest, but if you do it'll just hurt the people you love so badly that they'll hate you and never love you again...!"

Amy's voice cracked with emotion, her eyes growing wet.

"I don't understand, Amy. I don't know what dirty deed you think you've done. But Mom was right. You can't build a relationship on a foundation of lies. The light of truth is what holds us together and gives us strength. As a family, as a team."

Victoria looked into her eyes, her gaze steady and firm. "I promise, you can tell me anything. I won't hate you. There's _nothing_ you could tell me that will make me hate you. I love you, and you love me. That's all that matters."

Amy flinched away. She looked down at her hands for a long minute. Putting her thoughts together. Finally she spoke, her voice a whisper.

"Then I'll tell the truth. Even...even if it hurts."

Victoria nodded. "Good."

"It's the Simurgh. She keeps showing me things. Memories but not _my_ memories. Things I would never do. Dark, sick, twisted things. But in the memories, it feels like I'm doing them with my own hands." Amy swallowed. "To _you_, Vicky. As if I'm hurting you. Trapping you in a dark room, paralyzing you so you couldn't escape, and then doing _things_ to you, over and over again, like...like _Marquis_ would do. I think the Simurgh is trying to make me become like my, my father."

"That's good. The Simurgh will never win that fight. Marquis isn't your father. Your father is Mark Dallon. He's a superhero. Don't ever think otherwise."

"Yeah, I know."

"You're the greatest hero of us all. I know you don't feel like it, not now, but listen to me Amy. I promised to lead you, and I swear I won't lead you astray. I swear it. I won't ever let you become a villain like that."

"Thanks. Thank you. But. It's. It's not just that. That's not the really bad part. I think...I think the Simurgh did something to my brain. She did something to me, changed the way I think, and something went really, really wrong-"

As Amy spoke, her voice rose higher and higher in pitch until it broke, cracked.

Whatever it was, this was bad. Victoria tried to stay calm, tried to project a confidence she didn't feel. "Go on. I'm here for you. Whatever she did, we'll face it together."

"It's hard." A long pause. "I want to tell you the truth, but it's so hard for me to say. You'll hate me."

"No, Amy. I won't hate you. Never."

Amy squeezed her eyes shut. She spoke, visibly forcing each word out of her mouth. "Everything you told me. Our promise together. Mom and Dad planning the wedding. This shop, window shopping the dresses. All of those memories, I...the truth is that..."

Amy shuddered, and spoke the words.

"The truth is...I can't remember them at all. It's all gone."

Victoria stared at her. "You mean...your favorite dress? Or the wedding plans, the jurisdictions-"

"Everything. Our relationship."

Victoria stared at her.

"I'm sorry. I, I don't remember you ever loving me, Vicky. I mean, you did, of course you did! But only like a sister."

Victoria stared at her.

"Like a...brave, caring, amazing sister. The best sister I could ever ask for. But that's all. That's all I remember."

The truth of their situation finally hit home, and Victoria's heart sank. There were no words to describe it. "She took away your memories? I...that...that...colossal bitch!" Victoria felt tears come to her eyes. "Amy. Amy. Oh God, Amy. You don't remember _anything_?"

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I don't think I can go back into our relationship. Not like you expect. You said, you said that we were in love, that we made a promise, saving ourselves for when we're older, but I can't even remember-"

"You don't love me anymore?"

"No, no! I do. In every way. But the memories of our love, what we did together, what we promised-" Amy looked at Victoria, searching for something in her eyes. Her leader, her guide, the anchor for her lost soul. "You say we did all those things. It's, it's so hard to believe, but I believe you, I trust you, it must be true, but-"

Victoria pulled her into a fierce hug. "I knew it. You're stubborn as hell. Even an Endbringer can't change you. That's the power of our love. It's who we are. Engraved on our souls. Even the Simurgh can't take that away from us."

"Yeah...yeah. I guess that's true."

"It _is_ true."

"Yeah." Amy muttered into her cheek. After a moment, Amy returned her hug. Slow, cautious, but still filled with the same warmth and life that she had always had. After a moment they separated, and Amy began speaking again, more animated, words spilling out of her.

"It's so hard to believe. It's crazy. I, I _know_ you're right, intellectually. And I remember, just a few minutes ago, that Mom was so nice to me. She loved me so much that she risked everything to save me, drew her blades on Dragon against all those cannons. That really happened, right? I'm not just imagining it?"

"Yes. Yes! I was right there with you. Mom gave up her freedom for years, just to hug and kiss you one last time."

"But all my other memories are totally different from that! Mom was cold and cruel to me for years, and Dad, with his depression, he couldn't be there for me. You were my only friend, ever since I was little. The only one who cared about me, when Mom said she didn't want me and treated me like second rate trash. It feels so real, like it was just yesterday-"

"No, Amy, no. Mom was cold to you, sometimes, but she was there for us when it counted. When we went to her and said we wanted to get married...she was surprised at first, but after she calmed down and we told her it wasn't a joke, she was so happy for us. She was smiling so hard that I couldn't believe it! She helped us pick out the jurisdiction, and she said when we were ready to go forward with it she'd hire one of the big shot wedding planners, make it a high society affair for everyone to see. She said she had always looked forward to her daughters getting married, and her only regret was that there would only be one ceremony instead of two!"

Amy's eyes grew brighter. Almost smiling. Daring to hope, but anxious, cautious, as if she couldn't believe her good fortune.

"And I remember...I never told you I liked you that way. Romantically. I thought it was my bad blood, my bad genes that made me want something sick like loving my sister, so I thought you would hate me if I ever told you. So I never told anyone, I kept that bottled up inside me, for years and years, I thought I was going to go crazy-"

"Oh, Amy, no. No."

"I tried to test the waters, making little comments here and there, to see if you were interested in girls. But one time, when I tried, you gave me this _look_ and you said 'Are you asking if I'm _gay_, Amy? Ick, major ick. Let's change the topic to something that won't make me lose my lunch.' You didn't even realize you said anything wrong! You only took it back when I told you you sounded like Kaiser!"

"No. Never. I would _never_ do that to you. It was me. I was afraid of what you'd think. It took me like six months to work up the courage to confess to you. You looked at me with huge, wide eyes, and you said 'I can't believe it. God really exists.' And then you got this huge grin, and you said 'And she's right here in front of me!'"

Amy blushed, an irrepressable smile spreading across her lips. "That's...that's really true? You're not just saying that, trying to make me-"

"Yes. Really. I would never lie to you, Amy. That was the best day of my life. I remember it clear as day."

"And I remember...you kept trying to set me up with rich boys. Double-dates with Dean and the high-society darling of the month-"

"Are you kidding me? When we were invited together to fundraisers, to the galas, I got jealous when I saw you talking with the rich boys. They started calling me your bulldog, because I broke up the conversations and drove them away. You always told me 'Don't be rude to them, Vicky. They know not what they do.' So I tried to be nicer, but well, you know me..."

Amy made a small sound in her throat, the faintest hint of a chuckle. "And...and Dean. Gallant. In my memories, he's your boyfriend-"

"Well, yeah. That's only because you _insisted_ that I try going out with boys before we took our relationship any further. To make sure you weren't denying me 'greater happiness' with someone else. So unreasonably selfless, Amy. Dean is a great guy, yeah, but we were never meant for each other. There's no chemistry between us like there is for you and me. Dean and I never broke it off, officially, but that relationship has been dead for a while."

Victoria pursed her lips. "God. Arcadia was a disaster area. I didn't have time to think, with everything that happened, but I hope Dean made it out. He was sitting with Dennis, if anyone could have saved him it's him. Dean doesn't deserve to go out like that. Even if he is mister 'I'm not ready for a commitment that-'"

"'-cuts into my time shooting up druggies at the Docks!'" said Amy.

Victoria laughed, and Amy laughed with her. Half out of sadness at what they had lost, and half out of happiness for the new future they had gained.

"Dean really is a doofus sometimes, isn't he? Even in fake memories created by the Simurgh. Another universal constant. But our love is a better one." Victoria hugged her sister again, more gently this time. Amy returned it, with only a second's hesitation this time. Surer, more confident. Victoria smiled.

"Ames."

"Vicky."

"It's...it's not so bad, is it? Think of it as a second chance at life. That angel-winged bitch took a few years of our relationship away from you. That means I'll have to make up for it by showing you all of those happy times again."

"Yes. Yes! Please."

Victoria caressed Amy's cheek. "It'll be hard here, in the quarantine, but we can do it. We'll do like Mom said. We'll save the civilians here, kick the ass of any troublemakers and clones that are left, and make a new city of our own. Where love and light are the cardinal rules, and none of the enemies are allowed inside. We'll have a wedding with fancy food, and bridesmaids, and pretty dresses. And if anyone doesn't like it, we'll tell them to piss off and kick them into the bay."

"Yes! Oh God yes. Thank you. Thank you." Amy was crying again, but not like before. Tears of joy. "You are so amazing Vicky. I love you. I love you so much it hurts. I always loved you, I always wanted to share that love with you, and now, after all this time, I find out we had it all along-" Her voice broke, and she sobbed. "I'm so happy, Vicky. I was afraid I was going insane, bottling up that secret inside me, what the Simurgh did to me, and you saved me. You were right, you were completely right. All we needed to do was talk it out and everything's right again. _Better_. Better than it ever was."

Victoria smiled. "That's the power of love and light."

"Yes. Yes. I love you. And your light. You're shining, Vicky. Brighter than the sun and the stars."

"I had better." said Victoria. "Because you're more beautiful than anything on the earth."

Amy laughed, and it was a laugh of simple delight, pure and honest as an angel's song. "I have waited _so long_ to hear you say that."

A sound came from the outside. A deep, howling, whistling sound that grew and grew. _Hurricane-force wind._ The windows rattled, and in the distance they saw debris from the streets being pulled into the air from all over the city, sucked in a great spiral toward the battle downtown.

Victoria turned to the window and shouted. "Hey, you hear that you S-class asshole? We're onto your game. You've lost. You never had a chance. When you tried to break us you picked a fight you couldn't win. Our love is stronger than your hate. Our light is stronger than your darkness. So get the hell out of our city! If you ever show your face here again, we'll be ready and we'll kick your ass!"

The air over Downtown was slowly changing color, a deep green glow suffusing the sky, growing brighter and brighter until it blotted out the sun-

At any other time, Victoria's first reaction would have been to think of the city. Of the innocents caught in the battle, of the heroes giving their lives to hold back the threats. Most of all, her first thoughts would be of _action_. Of how she could save the innocents, crush the threats, and bring liberty and justice to her people.

But...it wasn't their world anymore. They had a different role, now. Their role was to survive the day, pick up the pieces, and build a new life. Become the protectors of a new city, the city they would build from the ashes of the old. The life of a hero was never dull. But all of that came later. Now...

Victoria leaned over and gave Amy a kiss on the cheek.

Amy went still for a moment, and Victoria wondered if it had been too much for her. So soon after her admission. The only memories Amy had of Victoria were those of a sister, and nothing more.

Then Amy slowly, hesitantly, leaned in to Victoria and kissed her back.

They sat together, in each other's arms, and watched the fireworks.


	13. Taylor 5

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Brian was quicker than a guy his height should've been. He stepped back out of the way of my jab, then turned his body in what I was learning was going to be a kick. Keeping to his instructions on being unpredictable, I threw myself forward and awkwardly tackled him.

His thigh caught me in the side as he brought his leg around, which hurt, but not as badly as the kick would have. Even so, I succeeded in knocking him to the ground. Any sense of victory I might have felt was short lived, because I fell with him, and he was more prepared for what came next than I was. We hit the ground, he used the leverage of his hands and his still-raised thigh to heave me to his right. Before I had my bearings, he flipped himself over in my direction and straddled me.

I jabbed a hand for his side, but he caught my wrist and twisted my arm around until my elbow was pointing at my bellybutton. I grabbed at his shirt with my other hand, hoping to maybe buck him off me - fat chance - and he grabbed that wrist too. He adjusted his grip on my twisted right arm and pinned my arms down against the ground, stretched out over my head.

"It's a start," he smiled down at me.

Realizing the position he had me in, feeling the pressure of his thighs against my hips, his weight resting partially on my lower body, I must've blown a synapse. My thought process ground to a halt. It didn't help that the first place my mind went was interpreting his 'start' as being this position leading to something else.

"We keep this up, and you could be quite the scrapper," he elaborated. "When we were on the ground, here, and I pushed you to one side, you should have rolled with it. Get yourself some distance. If you were really quick about it, you could have even been on your feet before I was, which would be a good position for attack."

"Mmm," was the most coherent response I could manage.

Brian smiled as he let go of my arms and rose to a crouch. Was that a knowing smile? Did he know how I felt about him?

Then he drew back his right hand, braced himself, and threw a full force punch at the defenseless girl, his fist slamming into the side of her head with an audible _crack_.

The girl collapsed, crumpling under the force of his blow. She hadn't seen it coming, hadn't been able to defend herself. She had fallen for his ruse of being a teammate and left herself completely open to his betrayal. Now she was laid out flat on the ground, suffering a concussion or a cracked skull or worse, helpless to resist whatever else the villain had planned for her.

I saw the briefest glimpse of Grue's skull mask looming over Vista's battered twelve year old body as he drew her into a tide of his darkness-

"Skitter. Skitter!"

Grue was shaking me, his gloved hand digging into my collarbone. I wrenched at his hand and pushed him away, let out a strangled scream-

No. Not my scream.

It was the Simurgh. Echoing in the back of my mind, growing louder and clearer with each passing minute. The Endbringer was getting closer.

"You okay Skitter?" said Grue. "I was getting worried. We have to go, _now_."

I let out a sharp breath. "I'm fine. Just...just checking my bugs. Let's go."

I followed Grue as he picked his way through the collapsed corridors of Coil's base. My bugs told me that Bitch was already at the exit, helping her dogs climb out of our tunnel, and Tattletale was with Coil's soldiers on the surface.

I was so close to saving Dinah. I had forced Coil to tell me where he hid her, in his safe house in the suburbs to the south. I had the passwords to his security system. All we needed to do was follow the plan. Ride out of the city on Bitch's dogs, pick up Dinah, and make our escape before the quarantine walls went up.

But the vision, the nightmare, stuck in my mind. It had reminded me that there was no _we_ here. Grue and I had been teammates. We had fought together against the ABB and the Empire, saved each others lives. We had felt real affection for each other, too, even if he had never felt the same way about me as I did about him. He said he thought of me like a sister, and seeing how much he cared for his real sister Aisha, that meant a lot to me. I was sure he would do his level best to see me out of the Endbringer attack alive and well.

But Grue wouldn't be my ally here. Whatever else he was, he was a _villain_. He had said it himself in so many words. He cared about his family first, his teammates second, and the rest of the world came a distant third. He would let the world go to Hell for their sake. So he let Coil exploit Dinah without a word of complaint, dismissing her capture and drugging as the cost of doing business.

Would Grue betray me, too, if he thought it would help him survive the attack? Or if he thought it would help Aisha? I had to assume he would. He had made it clear enough that he didn't have any compunctions about betraying and _breaking_ a young girl the moment she was an impediment to his goals.

Hell, the signs had always been there. I had seen it firsthand in the way he had treated Vista during our bank job. He had pretended to be her teammate to get close to her and then brutally beaten her unconscious. At the time I had been so blind. I hadn't even registered it as worthy of notice. I had been trapped in the villain's mindset, treating the heroes as enemies to be beaten instead of innocents to be protected. But the truth was that she was an good-hearted girl, and she couldn't have been much older than Dinah. A concussion at that age - I didn't want to think about what it would do to her brain, to her development. And Grue had done it without hesitation or remorse.

Which meant I couldn't afford to tell him what I knew.

My bugs had sensed bats above the base, crowded around the PA speakers and seemingly listening to Coil's last words. If my suspicions were right the bats were under the control of Noelle's clone of me, the clone that had power over mammals. I couldn't see or hear properly through my bugs, but if the other-me could hear through her bats she would know exactly where Dinah was and how to get her. And if the clone was anything like the _other_ clones I had met, if she was as murderous as Tattletale had said...then she was going to go after Dinah, and make her suffer a fate worse than anything Coil would have done.

If I told the Undersiders the truth they would take it as a reason to abandon her. I could imagine Grue explaining his decision in that ever-reasonable voice of his. 'It's a shame we can't save her, Taylor, but we can't take that risk. I'm being practical. We have ten minutes max to get away from the Simurgh. If we were picking up Dinah and running for it we could _maybe_ swing it, but with a crazy clone of _you_ gunning for her, plus whatever other clones she brings with her...no. We'll be killed or quarantined if we try. All we have time to do is to save ourselves.'

I gritted my teeth. Not a chance. I was going to keep my promise and be a hero for once. I was going to save Dinah or die trying.

Grue climbed out of the hole we had dug in the loose soil that filled the entrace hall. When he reached the top, he crouched on the surface and put his hands back into the hole.

"Here, Skitter. Take my hand."

"Thanks." I said.

With his help, it only took a few seconds for me to pull myself out through the tunnel. We were the last two who made it outside, joining Tattletale, Bitch, and the soldiers. The buildings of Downtown loomed around us. They had been the center of our city. The Endbringer's attention for half an hour had reduced them to mangled ruins.

I could only hope that _we'd_ come out in better shape.

Tattletale was swearing a blue streak. "Fuck! West side? Fucking Simurgh, thought she was at the Boat Graveyard, ninety nine percent. How? I was tracking her by her song. Feeding me bad info, precision targeting her song so I'm getting a different intensity? Absolutely fucking bullshit." She raised a hand and rubbed her forehead, her features tense. "Shit. If she's trying to fool us she _cares_ about us, she wants us to fail. But that doesn't make sense. Why fool me about where she is? We weren't making any plans with that info. Not about our plans? Something else? Then what-"

"Stop." said Grue. "You're getting caught in a loop. Focus. Something we can use. Find us the best way out."

"Shit. Right. Thanks." Tattletale glanced around us, looked into the distance in all directions. "Getting a sense of where they set up the barricades. Give me a minute."

As I surveyed the area with my bugs, I felt a vibration in the air passing from West to East. A moment later a massive crash rang out from the West, shaking the Earth and making us flinch.

"Hurry." said Grue.

Bitch was with her dogs, sitting on a mangled I-beam sticking up out of the rubble. Two of the dogs, Brutus and Judas, were steadily growing under the influence of her power. Already three times their original size. She was holding her oldest dog Angelica in her hands, stroking her back tenderly. She wasn't using her power on her.

The captain of the soldiers, Heroux, left his huddle with the other soldiers and approached her.

"Bitch. How many of us can your dogs carry?"

"Three each. Maybe four."

"Four each. That's twelve total, including the Undersiders?"

Bitch shook her head. "Eight. Angelica can't run. She's hurt from fighting that Empire fucker. Fog." She glowered. "You gonna make an issue of this?"

Heroux looked to his men, then looked back at Bitch. His expression sank. When he spoke, he kept his voice steady. "No."

I hadn't even thought about that. Nine soldiers. We couldn't save them all. Eight spots on the dogs, that made four Undersiders plus four soldiers. The other five of them would have to be...

I knew I couldn't save everyone. I knew I would have to leave people behind. Leave them in the quarantine zone, leave them to die or worse. I had done that to hundreds of civilians I had passed on my way to Coil's base, people I could have saved if I had chosen to make them a priority over Dinah.

This was worse, in a way. The soldiers had saved my life. Dug us out of Coil's base to give us time to escape. I was acutely aware of their _life_. My bugs on their bodies gave me a feel for them and their movements that was more intimate than ordinary sight or hearing, something like a motion-capture suit. I could feel the shape of their bodies, feel their breathing, feel them get restless as their captain trudged back to them to give them the news. Leaving them to die...

I deliberately looked away from them, felt a queasy feeling grow inside me. I did my best to suppress it. I couldn't let myself forget. The soldiers were the ones who had kidnapped Dinah in the first place. They were ruthless mercenaries, a hundred percent okay with working for the crimelord who wanted to take over the city. If I wanted to be a hero, I couldn't afford to shed tears for them. I couldn't give them mercy. Not when I had a limited supply and limited time.

I should be preparing for the worst case. The soldiers had no reason to obey their chain of command, and they had been exposed to the Simurgh for upwards of twenty minutes at varying intensities. Things could get ugly if the soldiers who were left behind didn't take it well. They were all skilled soldiers trained to fight capes. They had assault rifles, grenade launchers, tinkertech lasers.

Better not to assume a peaceful resolution. I had been focusing on the periphery of my swarm, trying to find the best path through the streets, but now I gathered an anti-personnel swarm around the soldiers on the surface. The soldiers were huddled near a half-destroyed wall, following their training to take cover in a crisis, and I took advantage by building up the swarm behind the wall, keeping as much of it out of sight as I could. If any of them resorted to violence I could swarm them in seconds. Their faces weren't protected, go for the eyes first to throw off their aim, blind them, then the mouth-

I was pulled out of my thoughts by Grue putting his hand on my shoulder. "Taylor, you holding up okay?"

I nodded. "Yeah. I'm fine. As far as I can tell. You?"

"Fine." he said. A little too quickly. There was darkness seeping out of his arms, leg, and mask. More ragged than normal, moving in restless, pulsating coils.

For a moment we stood side by side in silence, watching Bitch's dogs grow. They were as big as ponies, now. It would be another minute before they reached full size.

A series of explosions and crashes came from the West, closer now. I felt a pressure on my shoulder. Grue reflexively tightening his grip, so tight it was almost painful.

I raised a hand to push his hand off of me, but I hesitated when my gloved fingers touched his. Grue was being much freer than usual with his physical contact today. This was the third time now, or maybe the fourth, that he had gone out of his way to touch me when he didn't need to. Had I really needed his help to climb out of the tunnel to the surface? And he had _hugged_ me the first time he saw me, in the hallway beneath the base.

Was Grue more affected by the crisis than I thought? Was this his way of coping? Tattletale had told me that we all revert to our core programming in a crisis. Grue's was to get protective, to look out for his familiy and his team. Only he wasn't acting the same way with Tattletale and Bitch...

Grue tilted his head down. His eyes were still hidden under his visor, but I could tell that he was looking at me. Looking at my hand resting on his. Or looking at me _looking_ at my hand on his.

I swallowed and turned away, back to Bitch's dogs. Whatever his gaze meant, it didn't matter. I had to steel my heart. We might not make it out of this alive. Any one of us might be next. I couldn't get too attached, hesitate at a crucial moment and ruin my chances.

Tattletale spoke up. "Okay, I got it. They don't know where she's going to go so they're casting a wide net. Barricades in a big ring around the city and suburbs, plus warships in the Bay. The fastest way out, traveling by dog is...there. A straight shot south."

She paused, looked at us meaningfully. "Unless there's someone we want to pick up on our way out?"

"Dinah." I said.

But in the same breath-

"Aisha." said Grue.

"My dogs." said Bitch.

I felt a sinking feeling in my gut. _Damn it._

Bitch glared at us and growled, her hand on Angelica. I felt my own hand unconsciously close tight on Grue's, felt the bugs in the periphery of my range start moving toward me, coming closer to hand. Grue shook off my hand and took a step toward Tattletale, the darkness around him moving in angry whirls.

Tattletale flinched and took a step away from us. "Ah. Shit." She licked her lips, her features harrowed. "Look. The fast way, the _smart_ way, is south. We can grab Dinah too, it'll take two minutes and it won't add to our exposure. She's at the south edge of the suburbs, the song is almost nil out there. If we go north," she gestured with a hand, "even if we go _straight_, no stops, we might not make it out. Not to mention that the Simurgh is _north_west. If she gets in our way and fucks us over-"

"I'm not leaving my dogs." said Bitch

"You know your speed, you know the distance. Eight minutes minimum, plus time to get in and out of your shelter, to get your dogs in order-"

"I'm not leaving my dogs!" said Bitch. "They'll die! They're trapped inside, no food they can get to, water for a day or two-"

"Tattletale." said Grue, cutting them off. His voice was echoing and inhuman, distorted by his darkness. "If we go north and take the side streets where there won't be cars, pedestrians, we can save time-"

"Grue. Brian. Look at me." said Tattletale. "There's nothing we can do for Aisha. _Nothing_. If she's okay, she made a beeline for the exit. She's made it out already. If she got hurt - _no_ Brian, I don't think the Simurgh came near her, but _if_ she got hurt - she could be anywhere in the city and the cell networks are down so we can't find her. We can't help her."

"Use your power. Find her!"

"I can't find her! I need info to work with and she could be anywhere. Be _practical_, Brian. If you go north on a fools errand to find her, you'll get yourself killed or trapped in quarantine and leave Aisha _alone_. You want to help your sister? Do what's best for _her_ and survive."

Grue was silent. Still as a statue, his darkness writhing in coils around him. Fuck. Tattletale was saying all the right things but he wasn't listening to her. He knew she was a manipulator. But he might listen to me, trust me, if I-

* * *

"Taylor?" he asked.

He let the question hang, so I swallowed and replied, "What?"

"Relax. You're allowed to breathe."

I laughed lightly at the realization I was holding my breath, which resulted in a nervous, chuckling exhalation that only added to the awkwardness I was feeling.

He was smiling, "You okay?"

What was I supposed to say? Admit I didn't know how to deal with being around a good looking guy?

I stared down at the ground, at the table leg I was holding. "I get nervous when I'm close to people. I think, you know, maybe I have bad breath, or maybe I have B.O., and I wouldn't be able to tell, because it's mine, so I hold my breath like that to be safe. I dunno."

Bravo, Taylor. Bravo. I imagined the slowest, most sarcastic of slow claps. Talking about bad breath and B.O. was totally the way to go. One of those brilliant moments that would have me cringing every time I remembered it in the next few years or decades, I was sure.

Then Brian leaned close, closing the scant inches of distance that separated us, until our noses were practically touching.

"Nope. You smell nice," he told me.

If I'd been a cartoon character, I was pretty sure that was the point where I'd have steam shooting out of my ears, or I'd be melting into a puddle. Instead, I went with my first instinct, once more, and went very still. I became aware of a heat on my face that must have been a furious blushing.

It would be hard to say whether it was a mercy or not, but I finally turned to leave, pushing the hatch open as I stepped back into the gravel lot that surrounded the high-rise in construction.

"Come on Taylor," Grue called out behind me. I didn't listen.

"Hey!" He raised his voice.

I didn't reply. I was too angry, and as moronic as it sounded, I didn't want our parting words to be me cussing at him.

I was three paces away from the hatch when I heard the crunch of gravel behind me. I wheeled around to see Grue closing the gap behind me, one arm outstretched, as if to grab me.

My temper exploded at the same time my bugs did, spilling out from beneath my costume. At my instruction, they swept between Grue and I, creating a barrier of sorts.

I was already thinking of how I'd deal if it came down to a fight - his costume covered his skin, but I remembered the vents on the edge of his mask, that redirected the flow of his darkness from his face out the edges of his mask, so the skull image would stand out. In a pinch, my bugs could get in that way-

* * *

I gasped. The vision faded from my eyes. Or _almost_ faded. The bugs, the bugs I had been sensing in the memory from yesterday, they were all _still there_. The bugs in my memory were the same as the bugs in my range right now, all the same individual insects in the same positions in the construction site. As if they had been there all along. Impossible. And at the center of my sight, the menacing form of Grue advancing on me was replaced with...with the menacing form of Grue advancing on me and Tattletale. Perfectly superimposed.

What...what the hell was that? Was that the Simurgh?

I pushed it out of my mind. I didn't have time to spare. "Grue! Please. Listen. I know how you're feeling. It's the same for me. I had to leave my Dad behind. I-"

I stopped. Grue was looking at me now, his skull mask impassive, his arms folded. I picked my words, speaking slowly, trying to find the words that would convince him.

"I knew I didn't have time to find Dad, to help him get out of the city. God, I hope he made it. I had to _trust_ him, trust that he would know what to do and make it on his own. Like you have to do now with Aisha. We don't have a choice. All we can do is save ourselves, take care of each other, and come out of this alive so that we'll have a family to go back to. So Aisha will have a big brother to raise her."

Grue unfolded his arms, clenched and unclenched his fists.

"I couldn't help Dad, so I decided I'd save who I could. People I care about. Like...like you. You're my teammate, and...and you're my friend. Even after what happened with Dinah I still consider you a friend. So I decided I'd come back and save you Undersiders, and save Dinah too.

"Please. We have to save ourselves, and save Dinah. If..." it was a stretch, but, "Getting out of the city isn't enough. Tattletale said the Simurgh is fucking with us, targeting us specifically. Dinah can protect us. The only protection we have. That's how Coil got the Travelers on his side, that's why the Simurgh is attacking Brockton Bay now, it's because Dinah can stop her plots. We'll save Dinah and she'll use her power to tell us the traps the Simurgh set for us and how to avoid them. With a few of her questions you won't have to be a villain anymore, you can provide for your sister and give her a good life. Leave this hellhole of a city behind."

It felt wrong. To call him a friend even though I had planned to betray him from the start. To dangle Dinah in front of him like a prize. To promise to let him _use_ Dinah like a tool for his personal benefit. Dinah shouldn't have to be anyone's tool. It should be her choice. She could use her power to be a hero, or to help her family, or for whatever personal goals she wanted. To ask her, to _force_ her to use her power for a villain's personal satisfaction, it felt...

But I didn't have a choice. I would save Dinah, no matter what it took.

"Damn it." said Grue. "Fine. You got me. Let's go, then."

I smiled beneath my mask.

I looked to Bitch and her dogs, nearly full size now, only to meet with a ferocious glare. Bitch was livid. Her third dog, Angelica, was growing now too, her skin splitting and muscle and bone bulging out from underneath.

"Bitch." started Grue. "We-"

"No!" snarled Bitch. "It's always like this. Ignoring me, acting like you three are in charge. You don't get to decide. _My_ dogs. I'm the one who says where they go."

"I know. And you're taking them south. It's a shame we can't save them, Bitch, but we can't take that risk. We don't have time. You _know_ we don't have time. You'll be exposed, you'll be killed our quarantined. All we can do is save the dogs you have with you." said Grue.

"Don't care. I'm not leaving my dogs in this shithole."

No! Not when I was so close! I had to stop her. I didn't like my odds of convincing her. She wouldn't be open to my words, not after she saw me use her dogs as a tool to negotiate with Coil. If I couldn't use words, then...

I realized I was clenching my fist. Damn her. I had _tried_ to be her friend, gone above and beyond the call of duty. Offered to let her take free shots at me if I pissed her off, helped her with her dogs, tried to understand her and her screwed up mind. I had thought I was making progress. Now I wanted to call on that friendship, to stand in front of her and ask her to trust me...and I knew it would only piss her off. All my effort had been for nothing. She had never reciprocated, never seen me as a true friend.

Bitch had always understood force better than words. I began massing bugs behind Bitch and on the ground around her dogs. If she made a run for it I would have to take her down before she got her dogs going at full speed. Bugs might not be enough. I took a step back, sidling behind Grue, and surreptitiously put my hand on the compartment of my armor with my baton.

"No, Bitch." said Tattletale. "You're lying to yourself, trying to make yourself believe it. You know the truth. You won't make it. They have the army, soldiers with machine guns, capes. This isn't like hiding in the backwoods of Maine. They'll hunt you down and kill your dogs."

"Then I'll save my dogs and stay in here."

"In the _quarantine_ zone?" I blurted. "With the _Simurgh_? You're-" I caught myself. "That's crazy. You can't be serious."

Bitch folded her arms. "If you don't like it, you don't have to come with me. You can get out on your own."

There was a scream in the distance. A new scream, different from the Simurgh's scream in the back of my mind. Monstrous, bestial. _Noelle_.

"Fuck, fuck." said Tattletale. "Noelle's fighting the Simurgh. They're coming this way."

"Time to go, then." said Bitch. She mounted Brutus, fully grown now, climbing by the spurs of bone on his flanks. He panted and wagged his tail, knocking over a large chunk of rubble. I tensed, gripped my baton and called out to my bugs-

"Wait, don't!" said Tattletale. Was she talking to me, or to Bitch? Tattletale pointed. "Simurgh's coming _that_ way, Bitch. Noelle's attacking, pushing her north. You're going to go right into their path and get yourself killed!"

"Fuck you!" Bitch shot back. "Liar. You're bullshitting me. You and you," she pointed at me, then at Tattletale, "trying to screw me out of my dogs again."

"No!" Tattletale gritted her teeth. "Fuck you too. I'm telling the truth. God's honest truth. So listen for once! The Simurgh is fucking with us. Divide and conquer, separate the pack. Trying to put us at odds, make us lose trust in each other, fight each other, go off on our own so we'll be weak and can't escape."

Bitch just stared at her. No response. Tattletale cursed "Fuck it, can't you all see it? We spent _months_ getting our teamwork down, now a few _minutes_ of her scream and we're at each others throats, spending minutes on a pointless fucking debate to go north or south! We're falling apart and we'll _keep_ falling apart, worse every minute we're here. Since when are we a pack of-"

"Lots of words. Your power tell you that?" said Bitch.

"Yes! Do you _want_ to give in to the Simurgh? Do you want to let her win? She wants you to abandon your team. If you go off alone you'll lose everything. Your sanity, your life, your dogs, all of it. If you come with us you'll live, you save Angelica, Brutus, Judas-"

"_You're_ trying to manipulate me, too."

Tattletale spluttered. "You're going to trust the _Simurgh_ over me?"

Grue spoke up. "Bitch. If you go north you'll have to go past Noelle. If she touches _you_, what do you think your clone will do to your dogs? Your clone will know where your dogs are and how to hurt them. She'll murder them. Probably torture them first. Is that what you want?"

Bitch opened her mouth to reply, but he continued on. "That's why you and I can't take the easy way out. Because there are people, animals, we need to protect. It's not worth the risk."

"It's the same deal with the Simurgh." I said. "If you stay in the city you'll have to listen to her song until there's nothing left of you. It's won't be _you_ saving your dogs, it'll be a Simurgh pawn. You know what she does to people, what she makes them do to their loved ones-"

"Fuck! Fuck you. Fuck you and fuck them and fuck all of this!" Bitch screamed. For a second I thought she was going to run and abandon us, but she didn't give her dogs an order. She slouched forward, a slow collapse, until she lay face down on Brutus' back, giving him a full-body hug. She stared to the West, where bright flashes of colored light were visible from behind the buildings. "Fuck this. I want to hurt her. Make her pay for this."

"Fine. Do it." said Grue. "But be smart about it. Fight on your own terms. Go to the heroes and volunteer for the next Simurgh fight. Here and now? We have to survive. Let's go."

Bitch slowly released Brutus from her hug, lifted herself into a sitting position. Then she raised her head and _screamed_.

As if in reply, one of Noelle's bestial screams came from the distance. Louder than it was before. Closer.

Bitch panted for breath, then turned to us and gestured. "Come up. Let's go."

...

(Author's note: the visions are a mix of new writing and scenes from canon Worm)


	14. Taylor 6

12:52 pm

_Finally._ It was time to get the hell out of here.

I stepped forward to join Bitch on Brutus, but Grue put out a hand and stopped me, giving my arm a gentle squeeze. "Skitter, you're with me on Judas. Tattletale, you go with Bitch. Take the lead, direct her. A sensory power with each dog."

Tattletale gave him an odd look, then stepped forward to climb Brutus' flank. Grue mounted Judas, and helped me climb up behind him.

I heard a swell of raised voices behind us. Coil's soldiers. My bugs sensed erratic movements, agitation. The soldiers were regarding each other warily, some of them with weapons drawn.

Damn. I had hoped for a peaceful resolution, but it was impossible. We only had four spots on our dogs for the nine soldiers. Five of them would have to stay behind to face an Endbringer attack in the quarantine zone. A fate worse than death. They were mercenaries, they wouldn't volunteer to sacrifice themselves for their comrades in the best of times, and now they had spent half an hour with the Simurgh singing in their heads...

I readied the bugs I had planted behind the wall behind the soldiers, started condensing them into solid masses to engulf human-sized targets. I leaned forward and rested my head on Grue's shoulder. "Got bugs on them." I said, softly so my voice wouldn't carry to the soldiers.

Grue nodded. He faced the soldiers and raised his voice, a tone of command enhanced by his darkness. "Wrap this up. We have to move. _Now_, or you'll be left behind."

"Right." said Captain Heroux. "You heard the man. Throw down your weapons and we'll draw straws."

He gestured to a haphazard pile of guns on the ground. Only half of his men had put their guns in the pile. The others looked ready to shoot at any moment.

One of the gun-wielding soldiers, a dark-haired man with a scruffy, unshaven chin, glared at Grue and snapped. "We _all_ worked to get out of there. Why do the capes get priority? We should all get an equal chance."

"They have the dogs. It's not negotiable." said Heroux

The soldiers didn't look convinced. I readied my bugs, started condensing them behind the wall into solid masses to engulf human-sized targets.

"So why should we let _you_ go, Heroux? Draw straws with the rest of us." said a woman. She was standing next to the first soldier, practically shoulder to shoulder. Close, familiar. Were they related? Lovers?

"Because I'm the captain-"

"Doesn't count for shit now." said the dark-haired man.

"-because we have thirty seconds to decide, and because Coil gave me the account numbers for the _very generous_ severance funds he arranged for us in the event of his death. You want to get paid, you do what I say."

The dark-haired man raised his rifle halfway. Not pointing at the captain, but threatening. "Fuck that! Pay doesn't matter if we're quarran-"

So fast I could barely react, Heroux drew his sidearm and shot the man in the face. The woman screamed, raised her gun but was shot before she could make use of it.

Heroux kept his gun trained on the two bodies. Not aimed at the other soldiers, but the threat was clear. "Twenty seconds now. Anyone else want to argue?"

_Two dead._ Right in front of me. They weren't like the clone, they were _people_. They had worked to save my life. They had been afraid, scared of being left behind. And now, in a very real sense, they were dead because of me. Because I had a reserved spot on the dogs and they didn't. Because I was higher in the pecking order, because I was a cape with powerful friends.

For all that they were criminals, it didn't sit right with me. I was trying to be a hero and this wasn't something a hero would do. Escaping a sinking ship by using my power to push criminals out of the lifeboat. But...

* * *

It had taken some begging before Mom and Dad finally gave in and took me on a tour of the Brockton Bay Protectorate Headquarters. I couldn't understand why they weren't as eager as I was. It was a floating super base, for goodness sake!

Even better, I had the amazing luck that the leader of the heroes was giving the tour! That was super rare. When one of the other kids asked him why _he_ was giving the tour today, he muttered something about one of his inventions misfiring and disciplinary proceedings and other stuff I didn't understand.

But I didn't care about that now. It was _my turn_ to talk to the hero!

"Hi Armsmaster! I'm a big fan! I have your, um, well I have some clothes with your 'V' on them." I said.

The cape grimaced. Weird. Didn't he _like_ having his own line of kids clothes? "Let's talk about something else." he said. "What superhero do you want to be like when you grow up, little girl?"

"My name is _Taylor_ not little girl and oooh, I know that one! I want to be like Alexandria when I grow up!"

The cape nodded approvingly. "A good choice. Alexandria is an exceptional hero. Very meticulous."

"Alexandria is metty-cules?"

"That means she's thorough, dear." said Mom.

"Oh." I said. "I like her because she flies like _zoom_ and when the villains go 'Rarr!' she goes 'Wham!' and makes them go 'Argh!'"

"She does that too." said the cape with a smile. "I'm no slouch at that myself."

"Oh! And I saw on the news, Alexandria saved the Callyforny Senator's daughter from being kidnapped!"

"That's _California_, dear." said Mom.

"Yeah, Callyfornia. If I get superpowers I'll save people just like her. I'll save everyone!"

The cape patted me on the head. "You have good motivation, little girl. It's not enough to beat the villains, we have to protect civilians as well. You'll save innocents, then?"

I nodded seriously. "My name is _Taylor_ not little girl and yes! I'll fly like _zoom_ and bring the Senator's daughter home and throw her a party with cake and soda and candy canes!" I gestured. "See? Like this!"

The cape looked behind me to the girl I'd brought to him. "Ah, there she is."

Twelve years old or so, she was escorted by a burly soldier. She had dark circles under her eyes, and straight, dark brown hair that was in need of a trim. She wore a white long sleeved shirt, white pajama bottoms and white slippers. She didn't make eye contact with anyone, staring at the ground. Her right hand gripped her left elbow, and the fingers of her left hand drummed an inconsistent beat against her thigh.

The cape bent down and pushed the hair away from the girl's face. She looked at him, then looked away.

"I want the Undersiders to hear what you say. Give me a number. How would they do, without my help?"

"Forty-six point six two three five four percent chance they all come back. Thirty three point seven seven nine zero one percent only some come back. That's one question."

The cape paused to let that sink in, then looked up at us, "She calculates possibilities, we think she does it by seeing all the potential outcomes of an event in a fraction of a second. Her power categorizes these outcomes and helps her to figure out the chance that a given event will come to pass. It isn't easy for her, and I try not to tax her abilities, but you can surely see why this is so valuable."

I hugged my arms close to my body. When I glanced at the girl, I caught her looking at me. I looked away.

"Candy, now?" She started to bite at her thumbnail. Looking at her other hand, I saw her nails were bitten to the quick.

He moved her hand away from her mouth, "Four more questions, pet, then candy-"

* * *

...but these were the criminals who kidnapped _Dinah_. Who perverted my career as an undercover hero, who used me as a tool to turn an innocent child into a villain's pet slave. As much as I tried to make myself feel sympathy for the fallen soldiers...I couldn't feel a thing.

I shook my head. Maybe...maybe it was better this way. I couldn't save everyone during an Endbringer attack. Instead of shedding tears for the criminals I would focus on the innocents I could save. I tried to tell myself that it was what a real hero would do.

The holdout soldiers took one look at the fallen and tossed their weapons into the pile. No hesitation. Hell, they were probably _happy_ the others had been killed. With two of them down it improved the chances for the rest of them.

"Good." said Heroux. "We have three spots on the dogs. Split into two groups of three. Hurry! Good. Wedge, your group is evens. Pritt, your group is odds."

He tilted his head toward us, not taking his eyes off the soldiers. "Grue you have a watch? What's the minutes digit?"

"It's twelve fifty three!" called Tattletale from behind us.

The soldiers in the evens group swore. One of them, the man he'd called Wedge, darted for the pile of guns. Heroux fired instantly and the man dropped to the ground, screaming. A second shot and he was silent.

"Pritt, Brooks, Jaw. Get your gear. Take the rest of the tinkertech and give it to the capes. Saunders, Sheldon, step away. Good." He paused. "I'm sorry. You were right, Saunders. Should never have gotten you into this racket."

"Fuck you and your greedy paws, Heroux." said the soldier. "I should have stayed at home. I _liked_ being an electrician."

"You can keep the guns we leave behind, but we can't have you shooting us in the back. So you two are going to run a good ways _that_ way, off site." When the two soldiers didn't move, he raised his voice. "Now! _Run!_"

They ran.

The remaining soldiers got their equipment together in record time. Pritt and Jaw mounted Brutus while Heroux and Brooks mounted Judas behind me, delayed for seconds while Judas sniffed them and licked at Brook's face. It was a tight enough fit to be uncomfortable, and I had to hold on to Grue in front of me to keep my balance.

Heroux passed forward a pair of the tinkertech rifles, the ones with the laser attachments. One for Grue and one for me. Grue accepted his without a word and strapped it to his back. I held mine experimentally in my hands, tried aiming at a building in the distance.

"You know how to use a gun?" said Heroux.

"Point and shoot?" I said.

Heroux gave me a stern look. "I'll take that as a no. Don't use it or you'll get someone hurt. No time to teach you."

He moved to grab my gun, but Grue turned halfway to face us and stopped him. "No. Skitter, keep the gun. If you have to shoot, this is the safety." He tapped a metal slider on the rifle's stock. "Slide it back and you can fire. Watch out for recoil. The red button on the side is for the laser. Thirty seconds of charge, don't waste it."

I nodded. "Thanks."

Bitch and Tattletale's group had gotten themselves sorted out, Bitch rejecting a gun and cradling Angelica on her lap. Bitch put her fingers in her mouth and gave a high-pitched whistle, then pointed to the south. "Brutus, go! Judas, follow!"

Judas _leaped_ into motion, carrying us over the fence of the construction site and into the streets. I clung to Grue to keep myself from falling as Judas accelerated to top speed. It was a bumpy ride. Judas followed Brutus, spending most of his time on flat ground near the sidewalk and the edges of the streets, but every block he had to clamber over a collapsed wall or an abandoned crashed car to make headway. He didn't seem to mind the obstacles. He was panting eagerly with his tail lashing behind him.

I envied him. For all he knew, this was a walk in the park and the collapsed buildings were a fun and interesting obstacle course.

Despite the bumpy ride, I felt a squeeze as Grue used one of his hands to grasp the arm I had wrapped around his waist. "Skitter. Watch out ahead of us, tell Bitch if there's anything in our way."

I nodded. Right. I had done that for us before, but it was easier today. I had noticed it in the morning. My power was stronger today. My range was bigger, nearly twice as large as usual, and my bugs were more responsive.

"Bitch!" I called. "Three blocks ahead, street's blocked by a fallen building! Go around to the left!"

Bitch didn't respond, but Tattetale half turned to us and gave a wave. It looked like she was struggling with a black box one of the soldiers had brought, a device with a tall antenna. A radio?

After another minute of travel we passed the last of the skyscrapers of Downtown that had been obstructing our view. To the Northwest, the battle came into view in the distance.

The Simurgh was traveling at high speed, ducking and weaving between a torrent of projectile attacks from the air and the ground. Laser beams, cars thrown into the air at the speed of bullets, metal spears erupting from the sides of buildings.

The Simurgh dodged a thicket of beams and landed in front of an office building. She ripped the building apart with her telekinesis, breaking it into three chunks that orbited above her, shielding her from aerial attacks. Two of the chunks shot forward and hit the ground with a crash, breaking apart as they hit the streets and sending a flood of rubble skidding for blocks, bowling over capes on the ground.

The third chunk of the building, directly above the Simurgh, shifted in place...but before it could become a projectile, it vanished and was replaced by a massive monster of flesh.

_Noelle_. My first sight of her whole body. She was bigger than an elephant. Bigger than the Simurgh's body, not counting the wings. Her body was a mesh of giant paws, tentacles, and what looked like an enormous humanoid hand. On her flanks were five giant mouths that were spitting out streams of vomit and cloned bodies. Most of the clones were falling to the ground but some lifted into the air under their own power. Cloned capes joining the fight.

Noelle landed on the Simurgh, her sudden weight hammering the Endbringer to the ground. She used her massive paws to grapple with the Simurgh's largest wing, wrenching it at an angle that would have torn it off if it had been flesh and blood.

The Simurgh used her telekinesis to rise once again, lifting Noelle's weight while using her wings to lever Noelle off of her body. But Noelle's body was rippling, distorting, shifting its shape to grip onto the Endbringer more tightly by impaling itself on the Endbringer's wings. Before the Simurgh could rise, she was impeded by attacks from the other capes. A massive battery of multicolored lasers from the sky, pressing her down to the ground. Walls of crystalline forcefields that appeared at her sides, one wall in violet and the other in deep red. The forcefields were layered like scales, with razor edges pointed toward the Endbringer's body.

I could hardly believe it. The capes were _stopping_ the Simurgh. Locking her down in place. Noelle's strength and size were almost on par with the Endbringer's, and with the other capes cooperating...

Ahead of us I heard Tattletale swear. Judas drew closer to Brutus and I could make out her words.

"...capes don't know the clones are crazy! Think they're on our side. That's...New Wave, two or three copies...Narwhal's forcefields...Simurgh letting them...fucking bullshit!"

In the distance, the Simurgh withstood the pressures being placed on her and slowly forced herself to her feet. The scaled forcefields pierced her body, flensing away a layer of her flesh and making her 'bleed' a shower of feathers like falling snow.

Then the earth shook.

A circular pillar of earth abruptly rose up beneath the Simurgh, fifty feet in diameter and a hundred feet tall, carrying her and her attackers high into the air. A massive cylinder of city street, underground sewers, and bedrock.

The top of the cylinder split into chunks that flew through the air one by one. Guided projectiles controlled by her telekinesis, aimed at capes on the ground and veering unerringly to strike flyers out of the sky.

The biggest chunk accelerated toward the source of the largest laser, a cape who was a glowing blue spark in the sky. The cape vanished an instant before he was hit, teleported to safety. He reappeared in between the flailing bodies of the Simurgh and Noelle and rapidly retreated, his blue spark flying to the back of the crowd of capes in the span of a second.

As if she had been anticipating the opportunity, the Simurgh used the momentary reprieve to execute a complicated aerial maneuver, rolling upside down and flexing her wings to dislodge Noelle and dump her into the hundred foot deep pit she had opened under the city streets. The bottom half of her earthen cylinder hammered down, trapping Noelle under fifty feet of bedrock.

Relieved of her burden, the Simurgh hovered and stretched her wings, as if testing that her appendages were still intact. Then she dove into the midst of the flyers, swatting the capes out of the sky with her wings while dodging a hail of projectiles from the ground.

Seconds later, a massive purple laser burst from the ground where Noelle had been buried, sending a geyser of superheated and flaming earth into the air. With a roar Noelle emerged from the hole, half crawling under her own power and half propelled by the erupting geyser of earth. Noelle was followed by a bright purple spark of light that took to the air and fired a massive laser that scorched the Endbringer's flanks.

Tattletale's curses were even louder than before. "Absolutely fucking bullshit!" She turned to us and shouted. "She cloned _Legend_. It's Trickster, he's defending the capes by teleporting them into her! Grue, screen us off!"

"On it!" shouted Grue. He stuck out his right arm to his side and sent out a flood of darkness that blotted the battle from view.

_She cloned Legend._ I heard the words but I couldn't quite process them. Legend was the leader of the Protectorate. One of the top ten capes in the world, power-wise, and probably the _most_ powerful in political pull. Handsome, charismatic, everything you thought of when you thought of a true hero. When I was a kid Mom had gotten me a Legend themed toothbrush whose package claimed that my smile would shine as bright as his lasers if I brushed every day.

Now there was a clone of him flying in the skies. Crazed and homicidal, attacking the Simurgh first because she was the biggest target. The real Legend had survived more than fifty Endbringer attacks. If the _clone_ survived this attack, if she made more of them..._this could get ugly_ didn't quite cover it.

I shook my head. That was way over my head, a matter for the Protectorate to handle. They had powers to pummel Endbringers and all I could do was control bugs. I couldn't do anything to help them. I had to focus on my mission, on the people I _could_ help.

"Skitter, watch out for clones." said Grue. He raised his voice. "Soldiers! Watch our backs, shoot any clones you see!"

"Handled." said Heroux. He and Brooks unslung their rifles and half-turned in their seats, Heroux covering our left and Brooks covering our right.

For the next minutes we rode on in silence, broken only by my occasional shouts to warn Bitch of obstacles ahead of us. I wrapped Grue in a tight hug to keep my balance. We were moving much faster than I had expected, eating up ground at a rapid pace. Bitch was using her power at full blast, stronger than I had ever seen. Her dogs were almost a quarter bigger than their usual maximum size, yet at the same time they were swifter, more agile. Now that they had hit their stride they were moving like trained parkour atheletes, negotiating the abandoned cars and rubble as if they weren't even there.

Grue's power seemed stronger than usual, too. His darkness was thicker and moved faster, easily matching our rapid pace and keeping the city blocks behind us and the air above us filled with an impenetrable wall of darkness. The sounds of the battle were muffled and distant. Only Simurgh's scream in the back of my mind kept its intensity, and even that was rapidly fading as we gained distance from the battle.

It reminded me of how my own power was acting today, my greater range and control. My bugs, Bitch's dogs, Grue's darkness...they were all stronger. Was there a common thread there, something I could use? I'd almost think it was an effect of the Simurgh or a Protectorate cape, something that enhanced the powers of nearby parahumans, but I had the range boost in the morning before she showed up.

Tattletale gave another shout, and it took me a second to realize that she wasn't talking to us. She was holding the black box with the antenna, a radio she had gotten from the soldiers. She must have found a frequency the Protectorate was monitoring and was filling them in on the threats.

"_Yes_ I'm sure. I'm a fucking Thinker, look in my file. Tattletale, Thinker seven, and I'm telling you the clones _aren't_ on our side. They're crazy, homicidal, they're fighting the Simurgh for now but Noelle can't keep them under con-...What? _Noelle!_ The big ass monster spitting out clones, the one that's trying to sit on the Simurgh, _that_ Noelle! ...Shut up and listen! Call a retreat, get your capes the hell away from the teleporter. He's Trickster, line of sight teleportation, he-"

I left her to her work and concentrated on guiding our path. We were passing the edge of the area the Simurgh had destroyed, entering the streets at the south end of the city that were mostly intact. The Simurgh's scream was fading, growing quieter with each passing moment. At this rate we'd be in the clear in a matter of minutes.

As we got further from the devastation we began to pass groups of fleeing civilians. Refugees, now, traveling on foot because streets the were jammed with abandoned and crashed cars. Families burdened with heavy backpacks filled with all the posessions they could carry. Mothers holding infants to their chests. A group of elementary school children being herded by a high school student and two gray-haired teachers.

My bugs gave me a sense of their motives and destinations. Most of the civilians moved with purpose, moving as fast as they could to go South or West to get out of the city. Others simply tried to stay together as a group, families that moved at a crawl to accommodate young children or elders with walking sticks. Still other people moved as if in a daze, disoriented by the devastation around them and simply following the current of the crowd. When they saw our dogs coming they screamed and scattered, clearing a path for us to advance.

The street intersection ahead of us was occupied by a large crowd of youths in neat high school uniforms - kids from Immaculata? They weren't moving forward. They were bustling around a group at the center of the crowd, a knot of boys in a fracas. Yelling and pushing at each other, fighting over a battered backpack on the ground.

"Bitch! Crowd's blocking us ahead!" I called.

"I see them!" she called back. She pointed and whistled. Her dog Brutus accelerated and I felt Judas follow suit, his muscles bunching beneath me as he powered forward.

What? Was she going to...oh no.

"No!" I shouted. "Go right, there's a side street! Go around! It'll take us thirty seconds!"

Bitch glanced back at me, then turned away. She looked forward at the crowd her dog was about to ram at high speed and gave her whistle command again.

_Fuck you, Bitch._

I screamed at the top of my lungs. "Coming through! Out of the way _now_!" I called on my bugs and attacked the crowd, nipped at the back of their heads to get them to turn around. A few kids caught sight of us and scattered, but the rest of them-

Brutus reached the edge of the crowd and _leaped_, clearing half of the crowd in a single bound. He landed with a crunch and barreled forward like a tank, tossing the people in his path aside and leaving a trail of screams and writhing bodies in his wake.

_No._ It hit me like a punch in the gut. This was wrong. Sacrificing innocents to save ourselves a few seconds of evacuation time. I didn't want to be a part of this. But there was no time to change course.

I felt Judas' muscles bunching beneath me, following suit with a jump of his own. I clung to Grue and then we were airborne. We landed at the far edge of the crowd, Judas' paws crashing down on the prone bodies of two of the boys who had been fighting. I felt as much as heard the thick, wet snap of the impact. Agonized screams filled the air behind us.

I squeezed my eyes shut. This must be my punishment. What I deserved for joining a team of villains. It meant that psychos like Bitch were in charge of our evacuation, that we were forced to follow her selfish priorities. I was trying to be a _hero_ now. I had to stop her.

"Grue." I said, my voice tight. "This is wrong. I, we can't-"

That was when I realized the truth.

I had been clinging to Grue for dear life, my body squeezed against his, my arms wrapped around his chest. I had been feeling his tension in his body, his breathing, his attitude. From the first moment we got on the dogs to the moment we had rammed the crowd of kids.

And that entire time...he hadn't even flinched. I felt a moan grow in my throat, a silent scream grow in the back of my mind. Grue had watched the boys and girls be thrown aside like garbage, he had _felt_ their bodies crush under Judas' paws, all without a word of complaint, without a catch in his breathing, without a single sign of shock or remorse, his body rigid, firm, uncompromising-

* * *

Brian was startling in appearance. Taller than me by at least a foot, Brian had dark chocolate skin, shoulder length cornrows and that masculine lantern jaw you typically associated with guy superheroes. He wore jeans, boots and a plain green t-shirt, which struck me as a bit cold for the spring. I did note that he had considerable muscle definition in his arms. This was a guy who worked out. He wasn't big in the sense of a bodybuilder or someone who exercised just to pack on muscle like you saw with some of the people just out of prison. It was a little more streamlined than that. You could see the raised line of a vein running down his bicep, and the definition of his chest showed through his shirt. He had a nice voice, too. It was an adult voice, even if his appearance gave me the sense of a guy in his late teens.

If a guy like him had asked me out in some alternate universe where Emma had never stopped being my friend and I'd never been bullied? Just going by his looks, I might have said yes. I didn't want to get attached to the villain but I couldn't deny that it was affecting me. He was the sort of person I could see myself wanting as a friend, or wanting as something more. That was something I could use...

...

Brian pointed to the body parts in question as he explained, "Eyes, nose, temple, chin and throat are the areas above the shoulder. Teeth or ears if you can hit hard enough. I can, you can't."

"Sure," I said. I wasn't offended by his bluntness. He was stronger than me, so he had more options. Tip toeing around it didn't do either of us any favors.

"Below the shoulders, diaphragm, kidney, groin, knee, bridge of the foot, toes. Elbow is a good one if you can do anything with it," he took my wrist in his left hand and my shoulder in his right, extending my arm straight as he brought his knee up to gently tap the outside of my elbow. I could see how he would have screwed up or broken my arm if he'd done it full strength. He went on, "But in my experience, it doesn't come up often enough to worry about."

It was disquieting to hear Brian methodically describing how to break a human being. But I didn't want him to catch on that I wasn't on board with his career as a villain. I ignored the feeling in my gut and gave him a broad smile.

Brian smiled back at me. I mean, really smiled. It made me think of a boy rather than a nearly-grown man. He replied, "Most don't get that, you know? I'll try to share what I know, so you aren't caught off guard, but don't be afraid to ask if there's anything you're not sure about, alright?"

I nodded. "I'm glad you know this stuff. Can we spar next? I liked what I saw in your spar with Alec, and I could use some attention too." I paused. "My fighting skills, I mean."

His smile widened. He said, through a good natured chuckle, "Can't tell you how much of a relief it is that you take this stuff seriously."

...

"Shut up," I cut him off. "Just shut up. I- I can't argue with you on this. Please. I hate that I have to explain this, when I don't even want to think about it. She's the missing kid. Remember our bank robbery? How we were weren't even front page news because an amber alert took priority? That was her. Dinah Alcott."

Grue had his arms folded, and was standing very still. Bitch just had her usual angry look. Tattletale looked pale, even for the single lightbulb's worth of light we had in the stairwell. She wouldn't meet my eyes.

"Get it, Grue?" I asked him, "The bank robbery was a distraction for the local capes, so Coil could be sure to get away with taking the kid. We played a part in that. We made that happen. We can't just walk away and leave her like that."

"Some of us are kind of relying on Coil for some major stuff," Grue spoke. "Some of us have people we can't leave behind."

I looked at him, surprised. "I don't want to say your sister isn't important, but are you really willing to let Dinah stay in captivity, just for Aisha?"

"If it comes down to it? Yeah."

I stared at him.

"I'm being practical, Taylor," Grue lapsed into using my real name, "People are suffering all around the world. We ignore what's happening elsewhere every second of every day, focusing only on our country, our city, our neighborhood, or on the people we see daily. We only really care about the pain and unhappiness of our loved ones, our friends and families, because we couldn't stay sane if we tried to support and save everyone. I'm applying that concept to a smaller scale. My family and my team, they take priority, and they take priority in that order. If I have to choose one way or the other, I'm going to take the option that includes Aisha and you guys."

"You've seen Dinah in person, you've looked her in the eye." I said. "You're already involved, you've played a role in her situation."

"I'm not saying I like it, but I'm saying it's something that we should discuss and come to a consensus on."

I looked down at the ground, clenched and unclenched my fists. That he even thought it was negotiable was fucked up. What I needed was a way to convince him. A bargaining chip I could use to win the negotiation.

I stood in silence for a few seconds, taking deep breaths, centering myself. When I was sure I wouldn't make a mistake and say something I couldn't take back, I moved forward to stand next to Brian.

I reached up and put a hand on his shoulder, used it to rise high enough to murmur in his ear, "Do me a megahuge favor? I'll explain after."

"Of course." He turned his head just enough to look me in the eye, and my heart skipped a beat.

"Just play along." I put two fingers on the side of his chin, turning his head, and touched my lips to his.

I expected electricity, fireworks, all that stuff you hear about. I thought my heartbeat might race, or that my thoughts might dissolve into that chaotic mess that I'd experienced a few times in the recent pass.

What I didn't expect was the calm. The tension melted out of me, and all the worries, anxieties and conflicting thoughts faded into the background. It was like the sense of peace I got from waking up at the loft, times ten. All I thought about was the contact, how nice it was, the feeling of his lips on mine.

I broke the kiss and looked him in the eyes. He smiled at me, and I smiled at him in return. I felt his arm settle around my shoulders. He said it himself. His family and his team, they take priority, and they take priority in that order-

* * *

My head was ringing. The flood of visions dissipated and I found myself shaking. Grue put one of his hands on mine, the hand over his chest, and gave it a gentle squeeze. "We're almost there, Tay-, Skitter." he said. "You're stronger than you think. You can keep it together. Hold on for a few minutes more and the nightmare's over. I promise."

I felt my heart sink. Grue had felt me shaking and he was..._comforting_ me? God, he thought I was shaking with _fear_. He didn't realize I was shaking with _outrage_ at what he and his team had just done to those innocent kids.

I shuddered. Grue was so far gone that it didn't occur to him to be disturbed by running over kids, or that _I_ was disturbed by his indifference. He was sick. Thinking tender thoughts about me, about his young girl teammate who was clinging to his body, while at the very same moment watching impassively as his other teammates murdered innocents right front of his eyes.

Had Grue always been like this? Was this the sort of man I'd found attractive, who I'd considered a friend, who I'd thought was noble and kind? Was this the man I'd found myself clinging to like a lifeline? What the hell had I been thinking? That I could redeem an unrepentant career criminal with the power of love?

I kept myself under control, somehow. I couldn't let him see my disgust. I had blown it before, when I found out about Dinah and pitched a hissy fit instead of keeping my cover and negotiating with him, finding a way to bring him around to my point of view.

I had to keep up a front. A villain like Grue only cared for his selfish personal interests. Himself, his family, and his team. I needed to stay in those categories, to make him keep thinking of me as his beloved teammate, so I could get him and the Undersiders to help me save Dinah. Just a little bit longer.

I was going to do the undercover thing _right_ for once. Whatever it took.

I forced a smile on my face behind my mask. I tried to pick the words, the attitude, that would keep me in his good books. "Thanks Grue. Brian. You're right. I'm...I'm scared. Kind of freaking out here. It means a lot to me, you being here for me."

The lies sounded fake to my own ears, corny, but he didn't seem to notice.

"Yeah, Taylor. I'm here for you." he said. "I was afraid you'd quit the team, that we'd lost you forever. Then you came back and saved us. I apologize for doubting you. For doubting that you cared." Grue squeezed my hand tighter. "I'm not going to let anything happen to you. We'll make it through this together."

I shivered, hugged him tighter to cover it up. I was glad he couldn't see my expression behind my mask. "Yeah. We'll make it. Just...don't let go, Brian. Please."

Grue nodded and held my hand in his. We rode on for minutes in silence. The sounds of the battle behind us grew faint, and even the Simurgh's scream was rapidly fading away. After another minute it was almost gone, barely a faint tickle at the back of my mind.

"Almost there!" called Tattletale. "Scream's almost nil at this range. Keep your heads on your shoulders and we're in the clear. We can take ten plus minutes of this before we hit the legal limit. More for Skitter, twenty minutes and change."

I let out a deep sigh. All there was left was to pick up Dinah and pass the barricades. But I couldn't let my guard down. There were too many too many threats in play. Threats from without and threats from within.

As if in reply to my fears, my bugs sensed a riot of movement in a sewer tunnel at the edge of my range to the West. A vast constellation of insects being carried in the same direction. Lice, fleas, gut parasites. _A tide of rats._

I opened my mouth to warn the Undersiders, then closed it. No. I couldn't afford to scare them off. The Undersiders didn't care about saving innocents like Dinah. They would never agree to make the side trip to save her if they knew they might get pulled into a fight with the clones.

Our dogs were carrying us toward another cluster of civilians who were blocking the street, a large group of elderly men and women who looked like they had come from a retirement home. I sent my bugs ahead to scatter them and save them from being trampled. My swarm of bees and wasps sent them screaming and scrambling to safety on the side of the road.

One elderly couple wasn't fast enough to get away and stood frozen with fear in our path. Brutus and Judas evaded them, darting to either side of the couple, but Judas was careless. His long, bone-armored tail flicked behind him and slapped the man to the ground, slamming his head against the pavement with an audible crack. The man's wife wailed and ran to his side, a red splash of blood on her hands.

Grue didn't look at the victims, didn't even flinch. His hand was warm on mine, our fingers interlaced. I shuddered and hugged him tighter.

I closed my eyes and mouthed a silent prayer. _I'm doing this for you, Dinah. Please be safe. Please don't let my sins be for nothing._

...

(Author's note: the visions are a mix of new writing and canon Worm)


End file.
